As the Pan American Life Group (PALIG) moves into its third year of operation in T&T, Jose Suquet, chairman of the board, has said he expects the Caribbean division of PALIG's business, particularly in T&T, to grow in 2015, as the company continues to entrench its presence in the market.Suquet said the Fitch Rating Agency confirmed PALIG's A (solid) rating and commended the operation of the Latin American and Caribbean branch of the company.
"I am happy to report that the integration has set in and revenues continue to grow very nicely. We have a completely revamped company, having introduced more technology and systems and we have hired a completely new management team. I think the combination of these activities has shown our agents and agency managers, that we are serious about this, that we are here to stay."
The PALIG chairman sat down with the Sunday BG along with Bill Shultz, CEO and managing director, Caribbean; Bruce Parker, senior vice president, global life insurance, and Robert DiCianni, senior vice president, international, to discuss the company's performance as well as its plans for the new year.
According to Suquet, for the year to date, PALIG's Caribbean sales are up 27 per cent, this country's life sales have increased by 40 per cent, its personal accident sales have increased by 25 per cent and its group sales 36 per cent."We've also grown our premiums by 50 per cent in the Caribbean since we took over," said DiCianniBut this wasn't easy.The executives acknowledged there was a long, hard climb to securing their ever increasing foothold in the Caribbean market.
DiCianni recounted that while the Caribbean represented a miniscule portion of ALICO's and MetLife's business, it is 12-13 per cent of PALIG's business. He said they were making upgrades to assets, all while keeping operations going and retraining the sales force.
"Normally, when you make an acquisition like this, you might first say, let's work on the infrastructure, work on the facilities, get the buildings up, get the systems in, based on that new system we'll get our service standards up and then we'll get out to market. We're doing all of that at the same time, said DiCianni."It is like changing the wheels on a speeding bus while on the freeway," said Suquet, who is also president and CEO of the group.
The hard work is paying off, Parker said. "The brand is also beginning to resonate with marketplace."People are comfortable with the brand, they understand the brand, they recognize the brand."The executives said they were able to do this through the company's enterprise risk management system. One component of this system has already garnered the company recognition in its native US.
Suquet said Pan American has become the prime example for US recovery after a disaster for its ability to rebound from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But the PALIG chairman said this is only one aspect of their enterprise risk management system."The first thing is that it starts with the culture and the tone at the top and this is something that is very near and dear to my heart. This is something that is near and dear to my heart and we look at all aspects of the business," said Suquet.
There is also an operational risk aspect to the system. Suquet said these would include issues like cyber security and service delivery. The executives consider service delivery to be one of the key elements in the difference the company was able to make in the marketplace.
"When we took over, just about every aspect of service delivery standard was red. In these types of things, red is not good and green is very good.Then they started trending yellow, and now, just about all of them are green, which is a very good thing."Capital management and product development were also other facets of the enterprise risk management plan.
"I think it would be helpful to see how the things we look at from an enterprise, risk perspective. We take it very seriously. We have seen too many companies sell, sell, sell, sell and five years later they ask, why did we sell so much of that, because they had wrong assumptions, they didn't check what the actual facts were versus the pricing assumption for the product," said Suquet.
Given the company's success with life and group services in this marketplace, the executives said they plan to introduce four new systems in order to service it better.The first is a general ledger and accounting system called CODA, which align financial and accounting reporting at the company level."This will be very seamless and will increase productivity quite a bit," said Suquet.
The other two systems will improve the delivery of two other insurance products that they offer throughout the Latin American and American market."Finally, the fourth system is that we are replacing the group employee benefit system that is quite antiquated and we are going to introduce the system that currently administers all of our employee benefits through Latin America. That involves a significant amount of training for our employees," said Suquet.
The PALIG chairman said the investment in the company's human resource is constant with staff from its New Orleans headquarters coming to T&T regularly to conduct training.Bill Shultz, CEO, outlined other plans for the company in 2015.
"We are seeing opportunities for business, on the individual side and growing that business, as well on the employee benefits side. We have been able to confirm business with a number of companies that operate in Trinidad, or other countries and a number of them operate throughout the region."The execs said the company expects to do $745 million in revenue of which the Caribbean will make up $85 million.
There are plans for the coming year to increase this the between $98 and $100 million.