CEO Corner – Spring 2018

My congratulations and thanks to everyone involved in making ALUCA’s biennial premier conference held in Hobart last month one of our highest rated. It’s been inspiring and humbling to receive so much positive feedback about the highly relevant content, speakers, venue and location.  It was really heart warming to witness the genuine camaraderie, connectedness and warmth of delegates interacting during the breaks. A sentiment that was echoed by one of the conference sponsors who had never been to an ALUCA conference or event previously and was struck by this. The conference truly showcased what ALUCA is all about educating, developing and connecting ALUCA members.

The conference papers will be made available shortly via ALUCA’s Member Centre. You can read more about the conference and view photos from the event in the conference article here.

Spoiler alert – In the conference article you’ll see our next biennial conference location has been announced: The Star, Gold Coast, October 2020. The bar for this has been set very high thanks to our hardworking conference committee headed up by Board members Mary Sinclair-Porter and Sean Potter. A huge thanks to all of them and our sponsors. Congratulations also to the Turks Legal and SwissRe scholarship winners and Life Member Peter Jones – which you can also read more about later.

Strategy

ALUCA’s Board met in August for our strategic planning day which included a review of key activities and our measures/performance against each of these. Member engagement and member growth being high on our agenda. Both of which exceeded our target with our highest membership engagement and our highest membership levels of over 1,800 members. Our professional development accreditation membership has also proved very successful, exceeding expectations. We also discussed the changes to ALUCA’s Medical Sub Group who will be evolving to a Medical Forum – similar in structure to our Executive Leadership group. A Forum structure run and supported by ALUCA will ensure we are better able to leverage and grow this important group of members who currently make up 2.5% of our membership. You can also read more about this in this edition of ReB.

Webinar

We experienced some technical issues with our first webinar platform provider which set us back in delivering this years webinar program. I’m delighted to share that we have a new provider and successfully held the annual CPLI webinar for accredited members with Nick Kirwan from the FSC and life member Tony O’Leary in September. If you missed this you can now view via the Member centre.

Governance

This last quarter has been a challenging one for our industry. Corporate governance is a critical part of any business and has been the subject of some of the issues arising from the Royal Commission. At ALUCA we are committed to ensuring we have and uphold strong corporate governance. We are in the process of rolling out policies, procedures and agreements with all of our volunteers, contractors and staff alike and are embarking on a big cultural transformation program to deliver our 2020 strategy.

Professionalism, ongoing education

I personally found the conference session with Dee Maddigan about how companies/industries can recover from brand damage and rebuild their reputation really interesting. She talked about changing the perceptions of your customers via actions and strong branding, instilling confidence through the promises that are made and over deliver on these. This will help to create delighted customers and an industry people want to be a part of. She also went on to mention the importance of increasing the professionalism of the industry with a continued focus on ongoing education and great customer service. All of which are important to us at ALUCA and as I said in my conference opening notes it’s never been more important to continue to focus on the professionalism and ongoing education of the industry and reinforce the enormous & positive difference we make to the communities we all serve and the value that Life Insurance professionals contribute to this vibrant industry.

I’ll sign out on that note and look forward to catching up with you at an ALUCA end of year event.

Amanda McKernan
ALUCA CEO
ceo@aluca.com.au
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