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Cathy O'Sullivan:? Hello and welcome to 玩偶姐姐 Leadership Live. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, editorial director for 玩偶姐姐 in Australia and New Zealand. And today I'm joined by Sanjeev Gupta, who is the Chief Information and Transformation Officer at HBF Health. Hello, Sanjeev ?

Sanjeev Gupta:? Cathy, Hi. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? Thanks for being with us today. So, I would love to hear more about how you got your start in tech, and what have been some of the highlights of your career to date. ?

Sanjeev Gupta: ? Great to be here, Cathy. My career actually started, I spent over 30 years in this beautiful country, in Australia, working with variety of organization, implementing business and digital transformations.

In fact, if I were to step right back close to 34/35 years ago, how life becomes comes a full circle. I was actually doing programming in neural networks. And AI, believe it or not, and suddenly, as the thing that has become to go. So there you go.

So it's life's become a full circle for me, the highlights for for my career includes the work I did in digital transformation at Wesfarmers General Insurance, Cover More travel insurance, and, of course, now at HBF.

My career actually also includes couple of startups, one of them that failed, and every entrepreneur says I learned a lot and I did, and the second one that is still going strong. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So you've now, as you said, you're with HBF Health now, and you've been there for more than three years. So can you give us an overview of the organization and how you and your team support the business. ? Sanjeev Gupta: ? Sure.

Thanks. Cathy. HBF, for those who don't know we are a fifth largest private health insurer and the second largest not for profit in our sector.

Our not-for-profit status, what it means is that we are very member focused, and every dollar we collect in premiums is focused on better services, higher claims payout, lower premiums, and it doesn't need to go to any shareholder dividends.

We started in Perth over 80 years ago, and over the recent years, we've expanded our presence nationally. In fact, over 25% of our members are now outside WA,.

My team, my team works very closely with the entire business to deliver on our promise for our members to be there in the moments that matter, and to help deliver the business strategy by aligning the technology strategy with it.

My team is also responsible for cyber and keeping our members data safe and secure. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So you mentioned there about being a member focused organization, so tell us then about how you align your technology strategy with your business goals, particularly when you are such a member focused organization? ?

Sanjeev Gupta:? Yeah, I'll cover this question, if that's okay, in two parts.

One, what we have done to date and how it aligned with the strategy, and also moving forward, looking to the next sort of five years, what we are planning to do so first example is, as part of our digital transformation program, it was actually part of a broader HBF strategy to optimize and grow, to diversify and to enhance our business capabilities.

The transformation program that we we just recently finished, was designed to support a unique value proposition for our members, which includes by being simply human, what it means is having a look and feel on HBF website, which allows you for a better user navigation, for the ease of member experience available their way, which is really 24 cross seven functionality, self service capabilities, so members can manage their private health insurance without limiting them to the operating hours of a branch or a contact center.

And lastly, it was designed for you. What it means is flexible payments, real time financial updates, automated refunds, greater flexibility and also built in voice navigation aids for visually impaired people on our website without having to rely on any physical input devices.

As part of this, we launched some new assets that included new CRM customer relationship management, which internally we called Eve, as well as a marketing automation system that is built on Salesforce to provide us the functionality to significantly increase our scale, simplify our market, reach and roll out rapid product launches.

Now, if I look forward to 2030 the HBF strategy will leverage its trust.

Our members status for now and and the new systems and capabilities that we've built to become an active health partner by improving the data and additional capabilities, what that means is we'll be able to give greater insights into member needs for for our employees to service our members better and predict where they are in their health journey.

We'll be able to maintain stronger member and product portfolio management. We'll also be able to manage our operating costs through more efficient technology platforms and attract and retain talent by motivating for a purpose and empowered by our access to world class systems and technology.

We're doing all of this using our scale ledger model, which helps us deliver change in a in a metric that we measure time to value, and this ensures that we have aligned our organization and can remain flexible as we achieve our strategic objectives. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So you've mentioned some of the projects there that were involved in your transformation, and love to dig into it a little bit further. So what have been some of the biggest wins of the transformation program that you've led? ?

Sanjeev Gupta: The program that we did actually commence back in October 2019 and was completed in August of 24 so last year, it came about as we at HBF found ourselves at the centre of three key strategic challenges. Some of them are even valid today.

So affordability around private health insurance, demographic trends, which Australia has an aging population, and which means increase in chronic illnesses, putting pressures on claims, inflation and competitive landscape, where we had, really, as I call it, using a cycling analogy, fallen behind the peloton, and the only way to sort of, you know, get ahead is to first catch up with the peloton.

So our transformation program was designed to to meet these challenges that are reflected in our our market price position, complex products, suite and our aging system.

So a three fold strategy was introduced to modernize the systems and operations by creating the best possible experiences for our members, providers and employees, and to establish the foundations of a more sustainable organization ready for future growth.

The scope of this program, SaaS migrate our legacy system, which was a mainframe based, COBOL based, core insurance platform, to a public cloud based modern architecture platform so a new core insurance platform that includes product policy claims.

It's hosted on AWS, as I was alluding earlier, a new CRM, new marketing automation system built on Salesforce, enhanced member portal, our redesigned website and new app, as well as a new data platform, which was built on snowflake.

And we did all of this while changing our way of working and the operating model to implement a scaled agile model as well. What it, what it sort of delivered for us, is increasing operational efficiency. To give an example.

It's quite simple, but you know, when our members have event like, you know, they, they have a birth of a baby, typically, before the transformation, if they were to add a baby to their existing policy.

It took us anything between 30 to 40 minutes with some inherent procedure complexities, multiple screens that our frontline team had to navigate today with a single pane of glass and streamlined processes with our CRM and core insurance platform integrated, this process can be completed in about five minutes.

Similarly for our employee and member empowerment, you know, faster delivery with those modular components means our teams can iterate and continually build new features without tripping over each other.

The release of the my HBF portal that I was talking about is allowing our members to manage their private health cover in their way, and there's no need for them to rely on the operating hours of the call center or the prime challenge, and they can make their claims.

They can update their details, they can view their limits and usage. They can view their policy details. They can change their communication preferences. So all of this has allowed us to improve our member experience and also the employee experience. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? So lots of wins and, of course, lots of challenges along the way, which you've outlined there. So you also mentioned partners Sanjeev.? Partnerships do play a crucial role in any large scale transformation.

So tell us a bit about how you've leveraged the support of others along the way. ?

Sanjeev Gupta: Thanks Cathy, great question.

I don't think any program of this nature or this magnitude can be done with all the help of partners, and we recognize that very early on and our partnerships was built on a very strong foundation with some key partners that included civica, who's a software provider for our core insurance platform, Deloitte, that worked on our data migration over the course of four or five years, helping us migrate the data from the old systems to the new PwC, which provide us expertise on SaaS force, implementation, business, adoption, learning and program office support mental group that helped us with our AWS build and McKinsey before all of this, that helped us with the strategy formulation and the program set up the respective specialties of each of these partners assured the program implementation, including, you know, safe, data, cleansing, migration, people, uplifting and more was handled with care and caution.

So very, very grateful for the support I've had and the team has had from our partners over the years. ? ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: So you mentioned this all started quite a few years ago. Sanjeev, so when you look back on the transformation, is there any part that, if you had your time to do it all over again, would you redo any part of it? And what would it be?

And why? ?

Sanjeev Gupta:? Look, there are like any program.

There are so many lessons learned, and we've actually done a formal lessons learned as well, but if I had to pick one or to start with an example, you know, when we started our journey, and I don't mind sharing this, we actually got the choice of a core platform wrong, and 18 months into the journey, we actually had to pivot and throw away the work that had been done to pick a different platform.

This resulted in a complete race for the program, forcing us to change our approach into a big bank rather than the stage delivery, because we had to recoup the time that we had lost Big Bang.? It meant the complexity increased multifold.

We did manage to put it off successfully, very successfully, if I may say. But this is something I do not recommend doing unless you absolutely have to. For us, because we were so behind the peloton, we had to do it.

So that's one thing I would probably rethink if I took my time over again. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? And what about yourself? I mean, what did you learn about yourself as a leader during that transformation? I mean, a massive transformation. So what lessons did you learn along the way ?

Sanjeev Gupta:? On the personal, I think this, this probably is the most complex program that I've dealt in my in my career.

A few things that I have learned, one, perseverance and grit is so important, because there will be times when it gets really difficult and life throws a lot of challenges.

When you're looking at a marathon like like this over five years, you'll have technical challenges, you'll have social challenges, you'll have financial challenges, so perseverance and grit the second, you've got to really build a very strong team around you who have the belief in what you we are trying to do, because over time again, people change.

Unless you have that core belief in yourself and people around you, it can get undone. And the third thing I I actually learned, is for leaders, it is very important to stay positive, stay committed.

You know, there were times, don't get me wrong, Cathy, there were times when I was thinking, what am I doing? But you can't let that, because that will actually have a very negative impact on the entire team. So staying the course, staying. Positive.

You know, finding that inner strength is something I've actually learned through this program. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? Great to hear, yeah, it can be tough leading such a massive program and keeping everyone focused on the end result that you're all trying to achieve. So look, switching gears. Then a bit. Sanjeev, tell us how are you?

- we can't go a day without talking about AI - so tell us about how you're currently using AI in your business. ?

Sanjeev Gupta: That long actually? No, I started my first response with AI because I was doing programming in AI got more than 30 years ago.

But no, because of our capability that we put in place, the strong foundations, and having caught up with the peloton, the natural next step is to get ahead. And some of the things we are experimenting using Gen AI and also AI, I'll give you two or three examples.

One, we're actually implementing straight through processing, using, using bed track, cloud, cloud and text track. The specific use case here is we do about a million manual claims a year.

So many of the claims go straight, like, you know, without, without even us having touch it, but about a million hour manual. So we're using code and text track to actually significantly improve the straight through processing of those claims.

The second example I want to give is what we are doing, using our agentic AI, using Salesforce to really bring together information the disparate sources and make it available, first for our staff to be able to better handle the queries in a contextual way, and then eventually exposing that to the members so they can actually do self story, self service.

The third one, which is more internal, is using Microsoft Copilot and seeing that how it helps all employees to uplift their own sort of, you know, efficiency and effectiveness of I use it every day to see how can I do my job better, easier, finding information, consolidating information, and all those type of things, actually another one, if I may add.

This is actually very early days, but we're also experimenting with natural language queries directly onto the warehouse to see if we can actually, you know, provide those insights to the management without us having to write custom queries or reports every single time. So just few examples. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: ? So you mentioned a few proof-of-concept projects there. So how do you balance experimentation in AI when you have those POCs, but also ensuring you know that you are looking at things that ensure real business impact. ?

Sanjeev Gupta: ? Good question. Cathy, for us, I think first and foremost, as exciting and as promising AI is, you've got to always keep in mind the responsible use of AI and the impact it might have on the employees and the members.

So there are many, many considerations that come in, including, you know, data governance, the hallucination or the bias the model may have, the decision making, and how much of decision making you're allowing the model to do, and what impact, as I said, it will have on the business, on the employees.

So we factor all of those in, and part of the criteria of the proof of concept is to understand that before we actually scale it. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: ? And of course, 玩偶姐姐s also have to balance innovation with, you know, security. You look after security for HBF Health security, you know, costs and regulatory challenges. So how do you navigate those competing priorities? ?

Sanjeev Gupta: ? I actually don't see them as competing priorities, Cathy. For us, you know, regulatory is licensed to be in business. You know, without security, you can't really earn the trust of the members. And obviously you have to be commercial about everything you do.

So the cost is always in the equation. So these are not competing. They're part of, kind of, you know, factors you consider in anything you do, keeping in mind your own risk appetite as you make decisions.

Ultimately, it really boils down to being pragmatic and taking people along the journey explaining why you're doing the why comes in quite important and.

And linking these into one kind of you know view, rather than three separate or four separate competing priorities, to me, it's actually embedded in everything. So for example, the program that we delivered, or the things we do, we have security by design.

We have controls by design that allows us to meet our regulatory compliance and challenges. And, of course, as I said, you have to be commercial in the decisions you make.

So to me, it's all, I would say parts of the same kind of, you know, equation or cube or whatever analogy you only use. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: ? Now Sanjeev, if you had a maybe a first time 玩偶姐姐, come knock on your door and ask you for that, for your advice about leading through major transformation. What would you say to them? ?

Sanjeev Gupta: ? I was gonna joke saying, Be careful what you wish for.

But on serious note, I think you have to ensure that you have a very strong why the reason of why you're doing it needs to be well understood by the business and the stakeholders, including the board.

The long time it takes to do these transformations, as I was saying earlier, will throw many unexpected challenges your way, technical, social, financial market driven. A lot can change in their timeframe. We went through our face at share of change.

But apart from the grit and perseverance that I was referring to earlier, that you will need to go through. You will need to go back to the why, to remind people your your north star and that will help you get through those challenges.

So make sure that you really have a strong, understood and embedded in the mindset of the reason, the core belief as to why you're going through this journey. Because it is painful, believe me. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan:? Indeed, so what's next for you and the team then, now that this big transformation project is done, and what are the priorities for the rest of the year? ?

Sanjeev Gupta: I think priorities include building on our platform for most more self service options for our members exploring more opportunities of leveraging AI and generative AI to enhance our employee and member experience.

Our ultimate goal remains the same as how can I make life easier for HBF members, providers and employees so we can actually ensure we can deliver on our promise to be there for our members during the moments that matter. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan: ? Well, thank you so much for sharing HBF Health's transformation journey. Sanjeev Gupta, Chief Information and Transformation Officer at HBF Health, thank you so much for joining us today. ?

Sanjeev Gupta: ? Thanks for having me, Cathy.