Insignia Financial CEO Scott Hartley: Time to capitalise on AI
Scott Hartley says Australia must fit for purpose regulation that sets us up to safely capitalise on an AI- and technology-enabled future.
Economy
How would you rate the momentum of the Australian economy as we head into 2025? Official forecasts have Australia trimming interest rates from the first half of calendar 2025, is that consistent with your view? What are you seeing around inflation in your own business?
Our economy has struggled in 2024 as Australians have felt and continue to feel the effects of cost-of-living pressures.
We’re tipping that there’s likely to be two rate cuts in 2025, with the first to come in the first half of the calendar year.
We have felt the impacts of inflation in our business particularly in relation to technology costs and wages.
Outlook
What excites you heading into 2025? Are you likely to increase, hold steady, or trim your investment spend?
2025 will be a big year for Insignia Financial – the three things I’m most excited about are starting to execute on our 2030 vision and strategy and relaunching the MLC brand after being out of market for more than five years. However, our investment spending will be about half of FY25 which is dominated by a large and costly program to separate MLC from NAB. Pleasingly, this was successfully completed a couple of weeks ago.
Reform
As we move into an election year, in your mind, what’s the single biggest lever that can/should be used to lift Australia’s competitiveness or productivity? This could be across any area from labour market, tax reform, training or other areas to encourage investment.
As we move into an AI- and technology-enabled future it is important that we have fit for purpose regulation that sets us up as a country to safely capitalise on the generative AI capability.
Geopolitics
Will a Donald Trump presidency have a potential impact on your business or sector (tariffs or streamlined regulation)? Does geopolitics drive a bigger part of your decision-making?
As long-term investors – remembering that our super fund members’ investment horizons can be 20, 30, or even 40 years – we don’t make substantial changes to our investment portfolios off-the-back of election outcomes. However, what we do look to do when there is an election or geopolitical uncertainty is to take advantage of any market volatility to drive returns for our customers.
People
Has your organisation’s approach to flexible working – including working from home – evolved during the year. Is this likely to change further into 2025?
Our current in-office attendance requirement is 40 per cent and we have an expectation that leaders should spend at least 60 per cent of their time in the office. One of the benefits of COVID has been greater flexibility – which I think is here to stay – but I think we are starting to see companies increasing in-office attendance requirements. However, I don’t think one size fits all. Some teams would benefit from more time working together in the office, while others, such as contact centres, may be able to achieve better performance by spending more time working from home.
I think if you’re trying to build a high-performance culture, face time in the office is a must – it allows people to come together to develop and collaborate – all of which is a benefit to customers, shareholders, and to our people themselves.
Technology
Where is your organisation along the AI journey – is it in the developmental stage, or are you now using the technology at scale across your business? If so, are benefits matching the promise?
We’re at different stages of the AI journey in different parts of our organisation, largely driven by maturity of the technology landscape and ability to create differentiated solutions based on proprietary tools, strong data foundations and a long track record of delivering foundational AI including robotics and automation.
We’re deliberately taking a “don’t rush in/do everything all at once” approach to investment in the Generative AI space, which means we’re focusing on a couple of our business domains – Advice and Wrap – while continuing to evaluate commodity AI capabilities and opportunities to partner with leading technology providers.
Additionally, we prioritised low-risk high-return use cases first while continuing to grow our capabilities and putting guardrails in place to ensure consistency of outcomes, along with the transparent, ethical use of AI.
Where we’re seeing impact at scale, is in leveraging Generative AI and Large Language Models to augment our contact centre agents. Getting information into their hands quickly and safely (seconds, not minutes or hours), and providing them with responsive tools to create transcripts and generate insights, which frees up capacity and increases quality. Most importantly this builds trust and supports our people in delivering on the outcomes our customers want.
More mergers on horizon as small banks contemplate survival
Small banks must get bigger to compete against the majors and the head of one challenger believes the mutual sector could be reduced to just 10 contenders in a decade.
Star investors prep for break-up as mysterious Macau man lifts stake
A mystery Macau-based businessman is continuing to lift his stake in Star Entertainment Group, increasing speculation investors are preparing for a break-up of the casino operator.