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Nearly two years after, the former Microsoft Australia CEO has acknowledged that starting the online portal from scratch to sell products, such as insurance and superannuation, manufactured by other financial-services firms, was harder than expected, but said the strategy remains on track and is meeting internal targets.
“I would definitely say it was harder than we thought. We didn’t have a deep history or DNA of doing this so the degree of difficulty was harder, but I feel like really great progress has been made,” Marlow told The Australian Financial Review.
She added that the decision to pursue a partnership model required Suncorp to have a shift in mindset – not an easy feat for many financial institutions.
“The starting place for a large bank and insurance company is that we are not as used to that,” Marlow told the publication. “Banks and insurance companies are used to manufacturing and distributing their own product and they are fantastic at it and they are doing a great job.”
At an investor roadshow last week, Matt Williams, Airlie Funds Management portfolio manager, was bullish about Suncorp’s prospects, saying it was among the fund’s top five active positions – a positive outlook built on the company’s sale of its life insurance unit.
Williams remains wary, however, of “execution risk” faced by the industry giant as it rushes to deliver the iTunes of financial services, the report said.
Speaking about the process of signing up partners for the customer marketplace, Marlow said there was no one-size-fits-all approach to partnering but the foundations had been laid for many more.
“There are lots of different types of partners,” Marlow told AFR. “We learned early on that to bespoke integrate a partner is really expensive. The capability we are building now is what those partnership models look like, how do you recruit them, how do you engage them, what are the different commercial models, and how do you help them be successful because you actually have to make sure they are successful?”
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