Jackson CIO Michael Hicks on Execution, Agility, and a Customer-Oriented Culture | Technovation 840

We recognize working with financial advisors, they are directly servicing their customers, and we treat them as our customers as well. But we have to respect the fact that the advisor really is owning working with that customer on their retirement plan or their financial plan.

Yeah, thank you, Peter. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I'm very proud to be at Jackson. I've been here for eight months now. We are a leading provider of retirement solutions. If I recall correctly, I think we're ranked like number 282 or so in the Fortune 500 list. As we define our purpose, we're here to help people achieve their financial freedom so they can live the lives that they want. In other words, we're here to help our customers live the best retirement that they've worked their entire lives for. Through our distribution network, we partner with advisors and registered investment advisors to offer annuity products to consumers, really for them helping plan the financial futures that they've worked for. An annuity is such a critical part of what we do. Folks always ask me, 'What is an annuity?' My simple response is that an annuity provides tax-deferred growth and lifetime income. We're really here to help bridge the income gap between savings, Social Security, and if someone has a defined benefit or a defined contribution plan, but really fulfill that full retirement need with the income they need during that time of their lives. From a product perspective, we provide fixed, fixed index, variable, and registered index-linked annuities. We are also the top-selling variable annuity provider in the country. We're made up of a family of companies. When you think of Jackson, Jackson National Life is what comes to mind, but we also have Jackson National Life of New York. Jackson National and Jackson National of New York manufacture and distribute our retirement products. We also have two asset managers as part of our family. Jackson National Asset Management is an investment manager; they oversee our proprietary mutual funds that are part of our Jackson variable annuity platform. And PPM America is an investment manager that specializes in fixed income, private equity, and commercial real estate. But with all of that, who Jackson is at its core is all about our culture and our associates. We're based in Lansing, Michigan; Nashville, Tennessee; and Chicago. We have many long-term employees who have been key to building Jackson to what it is today. We were founded in 1961. Compared to other insurance companies, we're relatively new, but our employees have been with us for a good part of that journey. We're very proud that we play a key role in the communities that we serve. From a culture perspective, we just have an amazing customer orientation but also a key execution mindset. That really differentiates us in two ways: we pride ourselves on our best-in-class customer service, but also our distinct advantage in our wholesale distribution model.

As CIO, I'm responsible for leading Jackson's technology strategy, but also our architecture and delivery. That includes data and AI, digital transformation, enterprise portfolio management, to name a few. Like nearly everyone else in financial services and insurance, we're heavily focused on digital and AI transformation. We're making significant investments on both of those fronts. As a CIO, when I think about my purview, I'm just extremely fortunate to have an extremely deep bench of developers capable of building end-to-end software applications, whereas many of our competitors have evolved to become integrators of vendor solutions. We truly pride ourselves, Peter, in developing IP that differentiates us in the marketplace. This is important because as a retirement solutions company, we don't manufacture a physical product. Ultimately, our product is trust. I always like to tell folks, 'Our machinery is technology, and our associates are the secret sauce.'

Technology is primarily centralized to Jackson. Our technology organization at the enterprise level, we refer to it as Jackson Enterprise Technology, or JET. There are a few minor exceptions where we have federated teams, but those are really the minority. For the most part, we've brought technology together at the organization really to drive standardization. Given the velocity of change that's happening, we want to keep the entire enterprise moving forward so that we have competitive leads in every one of our businesses. I do have a peer, G. Moorthy, and he is our CTO and CISO, leading our infrastructure and information security. This was an interesting first when I joined Jackson because typically all of that is together, but Jackson has maintained a model of segregating duties between the CIO and CTO for quite some time. The goal is to ensure the CIO role is not burdened by day-to-day production and really is focusing on driving innovation and business value. Having led all of those functions in previous companies, it was quite refreshing to be able to come and focus on the business first and foremost. From an operating model perspective, we fully transitioned to Agile delivery across all of our technology organization. That's allowed us to be really customer-centric in everything that we do. We've also been deploying Agile to our business units as well, so we're starting to see those Agile and lean practices take hold across everything that we do in the company. Within my organization, since we're Agile, we are organized by Agile Release Trains, or ARTs, and those are focused on key aspects of our business. We do have product owners that report into our business units, but they actually sit with our Agile teams, and their focus is really grooming our backlogs and making sure that we're delivering the most important features for our customers. We are constantly evolving with our ARTs, and we're always making the shift to be more value stream and customer journey oriented, but that is a challenge with a complex business like Jackson. The final thing I would say is from a planning perspective, since we are Agile, we employ Lean Portfolio Management. We run quarterly PI planning events across the entire company, and then we've also established a Portfolio Strategy Council made up of senior executives that prioritize our initiatives and then work with us to ensure alignment to our strategy. It really is a well-thought-out target operating model, and we're still making progress in maturing it, but I'm really pleased with what we've been able to do.

I think there are a couple of things I would note. Number one, we recognize working with financial advisors that they are directly servicing their customers, and we treat them as our customers as well. But we have to respect the fact that the advisor really is owning working with that customer on their retirement plan or their financial plan. So providing data that's of high quality and really fits within that advisor model for how they do business is critical. We work exclusively with the industry but also provide our own APIs into platforms to make that easy and ultimately seamless for the customer. We also pride ourselves in our customer service delivery. We've won virtually every major award in the industry for best-in-class customer service, and a big part of that is what we do from a digital perspective. Our jackson.com website is very comprehensive. We paid very close attention to the customer journey, their personas, and getting those experiences to really be seamless and high quality. But we're also making a shift to more of an omnichannel experience, recognizing there are multiple channels of engagement. We want to make sure that we're meeting our customers where they're at. At the end of the day, our customers want seamless, easy-to-do-business types of experiences, and that's what we strive to do in all of our digital work, really powered by data and the work that we've done from a data perspective.

Definitely. I probably have had one of the most non-traditional career paths that you can imagine as a CIO. I was a CIO fairly early in my career. I think I was in my early 30s when I became a CIO at Lincoln Financial Group, and that was awesome. When you're going into technology and you're thinking about leadership, it's like, 'By the time I retire, it'd be great to be a CIO.' And I was a CIO early, so I had to step back and think about what I'm going to do the next 30 years that's going to excite me. I really stepped back and said, 'I want to focus on what can I do that's not only fun and interesting but I can deliver value and be in this continuous learning mode.' That's been important to me. Over my career, I've stepped out of being a CIO to take on a number of non-IT leadership roles, including strategy, distribution, and operations. Ultimately, those experiences have made me a much better partner to my businesses when I am a CIO. Because of those experiences, I understand our business at a much greater level of breadth and depth. But more importantly, I think they've given me an appreciation for the dynamics in play in each of those roles across those functions from a business perspective. As a believer and practitioner of CX, I'd say the biggest influence that those roles have played for me has been in developing my empathy as a CIO. We're constantly battle-tested in how we manage large transformation programs, production outages, cybersecurity incidents, you name it. However, nothing can compare to handling an escalated call from an upset policyholder who has not received their benefit payment or an advisor who's trying to close a sale that has a not-in-good-order issue. Walking a mile in those shoes definitely makes you a different technology leader. If there were a standardized industry career path for a CIO, I would absolutely advocate that everyone on that path take at least one leadership assignment outside of technology and walk in the shoes of a business partner.

Absolutely. Not only how I work with my team and coach them and develop them, but also just how we operate and act as a team. Technology is complex, and we need to be easy to navigate, easy to understand, and we need to be empathetic. Many technology organizations become so transactional in nature that they lose track of the people aspect of what we do. So it's absolutely played a key role in how I develop succession talent.

Definitely. I've been here eight months, so it's still fresh in my mind. When I came to Jackson and I was talking to leadership here, I told them, 'I think we're in the most exciting time that I've seen in my 30-plus years in the industry.' The level of innovation that's happening, particularly advances in digital, APIs, AI, you name it, it really is transformative. When it comes down to it, customers in our industry are demanding solutions that are easy to understand, simple to buy, and they want to work with companies that are easy to do business with. That was really core to my own values when I came to Jackson, to make sure that there was alignment in how Jackson operated as well. We're now seeing this intersection of CX, hyper-personalization, and omnichannel, all being powered by AI, which is enabling these amazing customer experiences. I heard a statistic a while back that 70% of insurance customers now expect hyper-personalized service. If we're going to be successful, we absolutely have to meet our customers not only where they are today but where they're going. With that being said, it's also key to understand that we're no longer competing with a customer's last insurance experience. Instead, we're competing with their most recent digital experience: Amazon, TikTok, Netflix, you name it. In five years, I think our industry is going to evolve and become a broader data-driven ecosystem where insurance is heavily driven by AI models, not only at a financial advisor level but down to an individual consumer or customer level. APIs are going to become so critically important because they're going to create connected experiences across the companies that customers work with. Advisors are absolutely going to shift and change. We talk a lot about financial advisors. The average age of an advisor in the industry is somewhere in their early to mid-50s, but you're going to see new financial advisors coming into the industry, and I think they're going to be heavily dependent on AI copilots to plug into data and insights that really enable them to be relevant as we go forward. The final thing I would say, Peter, is that disruption is coming whether we want it or not. Our ability, as well as every other company's ability, to pivot and change is not only going to be a nice to have, it's going to become a matter of survival. I always look at it through the lens that we each have a choice to either be a Netflix or an Apple, or be a Blockbuster or a Blackberry. Those who can turn disruption from a negative into an amazing opportunity are going to end up being the winners in the end.

Mike, I'll just start by saying I'm still on a journey. It doesn't matter how many battle stars you have or how many companies or roles you've been with, you've got to be in this mode of continuous improvement and searching for how you can improve. That to me is what keeps me motivated. I would say first, I've always believed as a CIO that we have to truly think and believe that we deserve a seat at the table, and we've got to be bold enough to have a voice to bring value beyond just being the tech leader. It's very easy to be typecast. Any CIO that you ask, whether they are willing to admit it or not, suffers from some level of impostor syndrome. We find ourselves in these roles, sitting at the big table, having strategic conversations. You've got to be willing to believe that you deserve to be there and to have that voice. For me personally, there are probably three things that come to mind that I've had to practice over that time frame. Number one is building relationships and getting to know the other executives at the table really at a personal level. If you're going to build a coalition of support, you're not going to be able to do that without relationships. I talk a lot to my team and my organization about being our authentic selves. I find it truly important. You've got to be your authentic self; you're not going to build a trusting relationship if you're playing politics. Number two would be staying abreast of the strategy and details of the business, the financial drivers, and what's happening in the broader industry. The CIO is an interesting role in that there are very few roles that touch nearly every aspect of a business. The seat of a CIO provides perspectives that most C-suites will never see. We just have to be willing to provide those perspectives as we see them. The last one would be being an active listener and really trying to understand what is needed to achieve shared outcomes. Shared outcomes at an executive team level is truly important; it's what galvanizes a team to go from being good to great. Being an active listener also allows you to understand what's important to each C-suite member. Finally, when it's time for the CIO to step into the spotlight, you better be prepared. Most recently, generative AI and what happened with ChatGPT over the past year is really the latest example. When technology disruption happens, realize everyone at the C-suite table is looking for the CIO to provide perspective and to lead the conversation. When those opportunities present themselves, that's when you have to take advantage.