A year on from sharing his plans to move not just one but two major businesses to a colleague-first agenda, Sean Kemple (pictured), Close Brothers’ MD of motor finance and premium finance revealed some of the key milestones that have shaped this journey to date.
“Premium had previously been broker-first as a philosophy,” he said, “while my philosophy and our CEO of retail Rebecca [McNeil]’s philosophy is colleague-first because happy colleagues equal happy brokers equal happy customers. So, a lot has been going into that over the last 12 months. To give a flavour of what we’ve been up to, we’ve expanded our leadership team to make it wider and more diverse.
“We’ve introduced a D&I charter championing diversity across the Premium business. We’ve placed significant focus on colleague engagement with town halls and offsite leadership [initiatives] sharing our strategic direction so everybody is aligned to what we’re looking to achieve. We’ve also implemented a number of new tools to help our colleagues which our brokers and customers will also feel the benefits of.”
The team has invested significant time working on its leadership development pipeline across the wider Premium leadership team to help create PDP (personal development plans) and expand coaching opportunities. In addition, he said, the business is working on rolling out its renewed sales methodology across the sales team to help position its proposition more effectively.
Underpinning this focus on a people-first agenda is an emphasis on recruitment and talent development and the last few months have seen the business bring in some great new talent and make a number of key promotions.
“So, we’ve been investing in our existing capabilities as well as bringing more people on board, and we’re already feeling the difference,” he said. “You can feel the different conversations that we’re having, and the different language and tone that’s been brought on. It’s incredible that the tenure is so strong in Premium but bringing in new voices and different views, different ways of working, different experiences has been really great.”
Having this strong people-first ethos as a foundation is allowing the business’s strategic focus to broaden and develop in an organic and measured way. High up on that agenda is the introduction of the premium finance business’s new insight product, Focus 360. The new product allows commercial brokers to identify trends within their specific areas, or alternatively potential growth areas that they have previously not considered.
“We’ve also introduced our Foresight product for personal lines brokers - so using data and insight to understand their propensity to cancel and allowing brokers to choose how they would engage with a customer. And we’ve invested in more data scientists for that team to grow that capability in the business, and that’s the first of the products they’ll start to roll out.”
A highlight in the calendar for Kemple and his team was, of course, BIBA 2022 where they launched their new insight products. Getting the opportunity to go out to the market and meet so many of the 6,000+ brokers who attended the conference was a very special occasion, he said, and it was great to see how the renewed people-first proposition of the business is translating across the market.
Digging into what’s setting the agenda for the remainder of 2022/2023, he highlighted that the focus for the team is on balancing internal with external initiatives, but also balancing what the market is asking for with the new technology and insights at its disposal.
“I think we’ve got a real curiosity because we’ve got new members joining the team who are lifting up rocks and saying ‘well, this is how we do it but could we do it a better way?’,” he said. “Then I think we’ve got a lot of market-driven reasons as well. Relationships are so important but I do think brokers want more value from their relationships. And I’m keen that when we have a meeting with a broker that we add value into that conversation.
“We’ve also had a bit of market turbulence going on as well. We had fair pricing in January, and we’ve got [to continue] to help our brokers work with that and understand that. We’ve more regulatory change coming down the road in the form of consumer duty, so we’ve got to support and help around that as well. So, I think for us, it’s about creating an environment that is constantly evolving in line with brokers’ and customers’ needs.”
There’s an innate curiosity to the team at Premium, he said, as it’s made up of people who want to be on the front line of such evolutions. Of course, the difficulty with that is prioritisation because everybody will have a different take on what the right area of focus is for the year ahead, but having the right culture in place creates greater alignment and a shared vision of where to go next.
“Now we have a top priority list, we then have a secondary list – and we have enough priorities for us to be able to maximise the next three years,” he said. “But the key is, which ones are we selecting, and why. And that’s driven by colleagues and brokers informing us. We’re also setting up our broker advisory board and that will be a key input for us in terms of deciding what we schedule, when we schedule it, what gets rolled out and what gets prioritised.”
Looking to the year ahead, Kemple noted that the business has set out a very ambitious roadmap. There are two key stakeholders whose insights will confirm that this roadmap has been a success, he said, and the first is Premium’s colleagues, as continuing to get the nod from them that the business is moving in the right direction is an essential metric.
“Then, from a broker perspective, one of the key pieces is when we’re engaging with brokers and they’re saying ‘we feel a different Close Brothers and you’re adding value to our business’, that is a very big thing for me. And that will flow through to the P&L and to the loan book - and everything else will take care of itself. So, it’s about affirmation from our two biggest stakeholders, colleagues and brokers, around going in the right direction and doing the right thing is what would make a good 2022/2023 for me.”
