2021 Making a Difference award winner reaps rewards

It’s not too late to make a submission to the ANZIIF Making a Difference Awards. 2021 winner, Poppy Foxton, says you won’t regret the experience — even if you don’t win.

For 2021 Making A Difference award winner Poppy Foxton from Honan Insurance Group, being involved in the awards process was a valuable opportunity to reflect on how far she has come.

Since winning the award in the claims category, Foxton has been promoted to Head of Corporate Insurance, one of Honan’s largest business units.

‘The role includes leading a team of over 60 people with responsibility for corporate broking, claims and workplace risk across Australia,’ Foxton says. ‘It has certainly been a big shift for me, but I am loving it.’

Moving ahead

At the time she won the Making a Difference award, Foxton was Head of Claims at Honan and its specialist TPA division, Risksmart, with a 13-year track record in claims.

While she was surprised and pleased to have won the award, Foxton is clear that the recognition belonged to Honan’s accomplishments within claims.

‘Having our efforts recognised holds a lot of value to Honan, our reputation and brand awareness,’ she says of the achievement.

‘It also provides an opportunity to reinforce one of our core values “Win, together”.

‘I was supported by many across Honan and as such we were able to celebrate together and be immensely proud of our achievements.

‘ANZIIF is such a highly regarded institution within our industry, and one we hold immense respect for,’ Foxton adds

Innovation recognised

In the 2021 Making a Difference Awards, Foxton’s team was recognised for creating and implementing the Honan portal 'Indigo', a dedicated platform that allows Honan customers to view and track their changing risk profile including claims activity.

‘We had ten years’ worth of data for some of our clients,’ Foxton says, ‘including high frequency claims.

'We’d already done a very good job of getting a granular level of detail, categorising it and picking up trends. However, we didn't have a sophisticated tool to make it immediately accessible to our clients.’

In what Foxton described as a ‘labour of love’, the entire team worked in strong collaboration with IT to design and build the new portal with support from a third-party supplier.

‘Anyone who has built something like that knows how much work goes into it, she says, ‘it’s never as simple as it seems. But once we had effectively taken the data analytics we already had for our clients on a quarterly basis and put that into this portal it was quite amazing.’

Seeing results

Rolling the portal out was particularly exciting because Honan clients were amazed by it and quickly embedded the built-in forecasting model for use in their budget decision-making processes.

‘Clients can log in and see their data live and it refreshes every two hours. As their risk profile changes, it’s all immediately reflected in the portal.’

‘They can use it to understand their costs, their reserves, their potential claims frequencies in the quarters ahead and some also use it for measuring their own internal KPIs.

‘We have KPIs we’ve agreed to in terms of claims settlement under deductible, but our clients might also have KPIs in terms of improvements they wish to make to their business from a risk management perspective. With Indigo, we can capture that data and track it for them.’

Building confidence

Foxton says winning the Making a Difference Award increased her confidence in the projects she helped drive over the last 24 months, including the creation of the Indigo portal.

‘It is fantastic to see those projects recognised, as me the Honan team and I put a lot of hard work into them,’ she says.

‘It has also provided me with further encouragement to keep innovating, sharing ideas and collaborating with all areas of our business as the outcome can be very rewarding, over and above the deliverables.’

She adds that Honan is building the portal out further to compliment the risk profiling division of the business, which focuses on modelling and prevention.

‘We’re looking at heat mapping, for example, which will help clients identify different areas that may be subject to certain perils.’

Worth the effort

Foxton says participating in the Making a Difference Awards is something all insurance professionals should strive for.

‘If you do win it's fantastic to be able to say that you won a prestigious award, but it is also tremendously rewarding to have your efforts acknowledged and recognised as being worthy to be considered.’

‘At Honan we put ourselves forward for a lot of things because we take the view that there’s really no downside and that it is important to celebrate and share what we are achieving individually and as a company.’

It’s not too late to enter!

Making A Difference Awards (Claims, Underwriting and Life Insurance) close 5 September

Making A Difference Awards (General Insurance, Reinsurance and Broking) close 3 October

Make a submission