Title: Claims Product Owner

Department: Technology – Continuous Delivery

Joined TAL: August 2020

It’s one thing to see the numbers and know that a policy change has opened up insurance to a community of Australians who were previously denied this coverage. It’s another thing to meet someone in the flesh and have them share the impact this change has had on their family.

This happened at a conference when I met someone who spoke to me about how changes to life insurance had created new options for his family. Following the release of the Victorian Pride Lobby’s Worth the Risk report, which set out 24 recommendations to improve how LGBTIQ+ Australians acquire and transact on insurance products, TAL took a sector leadership position, including changing how HIV was assessed during the underwriting process.

This led to almost all other insurers updating their guidelines, providing access to insurance for Australians living with HIV. Hearing this man share how he and his partner had previously been denied insurance and the level of comfort and protection they now had, including the option to do things like purchase a property, was incredibly powerful. It brought home the power for change we have as one of Australia’s leading life insurers.

This capacity to drive change and enhance the customer experience is one of the best parts of my job. In my role as a Claims Product Owner, I’m constantly looking at how we can use technology to make it easier for Australians to get the insurance protection and peace of mind they need. For example, we run quarterly hackathons through the TAL Technology Academy to look at the challenges facing the industry.

We recently invited the Australian Disability Network to participate in one of our hackathons, who helped our team to explore inclusion-first approaches to building our products and solutions. With TAL paying over 50,000 customers benefits each year, many of these people have a level of disability or impairment through the very nature of their claim. Collaboratively working with the community to ensure we’re thinking about accessibility needs and bringing customer viewpoints into the room is helping us to support Australians better.

I’m also the Chair of the TAL Pride Network, an employee resource group for our LGBTIQ+ team. We take an intersectional view, as we know people are more than just one identity, so we partner with other streams like gender and Indigenous inclusion, to help lift everyone together.

This philosophy of ‘raising up’ applies to our work across the industry too. Unlike some other insurers, TAL has both size and scale, so we use this to show thought and industry leadership. Working with other organisations to have a community-based approach helps us come together to lift the standard of insurance in Australia and help more people.

We want to have an impact that is larger than TAL and see diversity and inclusion be lifted across all of Australia through our partnerships.

Interested in applying?