I trust you enjoyed the Manulife Prestige customer center visit, and that it really showed you the value that we create for our customers here in Hong Kong, and the tremendous talent, actually, that we have in our business. So Patrick, Calvin, Carrie, Ivan, I think you all did a fantastic job, and as well as the teams that supported you in doing that. I think, for me, it really demonstrated the uniqueness of our propositions in Hong Kong, that we can create holistic solutions, wealth, retirement, and insurance, as well as health, all combined together. Now, yesterday, you may recall that during my presentation, I referenced DBS at least 3 times. I lost count.
You can probably tell that it's a partnership that I'm very passionate about, Roy is very passionate about, and I speak for all my colleagues at Manulife when I say we're passionate about this partnership. It's a partnership that started in 2016 and has been truly transformational, and I did give you a teaser yesterday that there would be a fireside chat between Roy and Piyush. That time has now come, so please join me in welcoming Roy and Piyush to the stage.
Okay, good morning, everyone. I am delighted to be joined on stage by, with Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS Bank. We did talk about this fireside chat yesterday, and I know that a lot of you have been anticipating this for some time. Now, Piyush doesn't really need an introduction, but it would be remiss of me not to highlight some of the incredible achievements that he's achieved at DBS and his own personal accomplishments. He joined DBS as the CEO in 2009, where he's shown exceptional leadership. He transformed DBS from a banking leader to a technology leader, and DBS, under his leadership, was named the world's best bank, as well as the world's most digital bank by several leading publications. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review named DBS one of the most transformative organizations of the decade.
At the same time, Piyush has also been personally recognized for his successes. In 2020, he was awarded the Public Service Star by the President of Singapore, 2021, Global Indian of the Year by The Economic Times, and in 2023, he was named the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award, the Indian government's highest honor for the country's diaspora. I'm also proud to say that Piyush is a very dear and close friend of mine. Welcome, Piyush. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Roy. Happy to be here. I heard Phil talk about this passionate relationship. I got to tell you, the passionate relationship starts here. We worked together many years, and so we've been old friends.
Now, Piyush, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna maybe start with the macro perspective on Asia, then dive into some of the countries before talking about our partnership and then opening the floor for Q&A. But maybe we could just start with your perspective on Asia, the macroeconomic environment, and how you see things unfolding for the next 3-5 years.
So let me start with some fundamentals. I think a lot of people in the room might know that, but I'll say them nevertheless. Obviously, I'm here, so I've got to speak my book. I'm very constructive on Asia because the fundamental mega trends that are driving Asia, those are pretty much intact. And while, like all emerging markets, will go through ups and downs, those underlying drivers are very strong. The first of those is, Asia used to be only the factory of the world. You think about the 1980s, 1990s, and so on. In the last couple of decades, it's shifted from being just the factory of the world to also being a massive market. It's a consuming Asia. So this is the first mega trend. It's a massively consuming Asia.
The total middle class in Asia is expected to go from about 2 billion to 3.5 billion over a decade. Don't ask me how they count middle class, because the number keeps changing. But McKinsey sort of called it a $10 trillion consumption economy, and that you can see. You go to any shopping mall, street markets, anywhere in Asia, it's buzzing in the lights. So people are out there, and people are spending. You're going to be in Jakarta, some of you. You're going to see any of the malls and shopping district. You can see that activity is there. But it's not just the mass consumer market. Mass affluent, this I can tell you with more confidence, the wealth creation in Asia has just been unbelievable.
In five years, 2020 to 2025 or something like that, mass affluent wealth has gone from $2.5 trillion to $4.5 trillion, or it will by next year. That's unbelievable, you know, that kind of wealth growth. The upper high, the ultra-high net worth, there are about 1,000 billionaires in Asia, all newly minted, right, in the last 15, 20 years. Now, that whole dynamic of a consuming Asia marketplace and bubbling this thing, that's very significant.
Mm.
I don't think that trend's changing anytime soon. You know, there is. You look at the per capita income, most of the countries, the $3,000-$4,000, $6,000, $8,000. They're at the level when all the economics tells you they're hitting their stride in terms of being consumer economies. But I said it's also become a consumer economy, but it's also continues to be a factory. And if you look at the PMI data, you look at the production industrial data for all of these countries, they have done a great job of the migration from the shoes, slippers, apparel, clothing, to tech, to precision engineering, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, the interesting thing is, geopolitics notwithstanding, and all of these questions about China plus one and everybody moving out, a large part of that manufacturing continues to stay in the region.
Mm.
In our own analysis, data showed that to take the TMT supply chain out of China is 10-15 years of work. Can't be done easily. On top of that, what happens is when your market is here, for many of the companies, you need to have your production facilities where your market is. Why would you move it to Mexico and Canada? You do it to service the U.S. market, but a large chunk of the market is right here, so you keep your facilities here. We are seeing that, even in the last few years, that people are moving and diversifying out of China and doing stuff. It's going to Vietnam, it's going to Thailand for automotive, it's going to Malaysia and Penang for electronics, it's going into Indonesia, it's going to China.
So the manufacturing prowess of the region is pretty substantive and intact. And the third is it's integrating Asia, and it's something people don't realize. You know, EU, everybody realizes, the 27 or 28 countries, and Brussels runs things. But in Asia, the underlying systems of trade and capital have been integrating massively in the last 2 or 3 decades. Today, 58% or 59% of Asian trade happens in Asia, and partly because of the things I'm talking about. You know, so people are sort of manufacturing in one place, exporting from another place, shipping from another place, and so on. But also FDI. If you look at total FDI, about 55% or 60% of Asian FDI is in Asia.
Mm.
So capital flows are circulating. In the past, Asian money used to go to the West and circle back. Today, a lot of the money, trade flows, capital flows are in the region, so it's integrating Asia. And the last, megatrend to me is, you know, the demographics. While some countries are aging, by and large, average age in Asia is 27, 28. You know, in the U.S. it's 38, Europe is 42. What that means is digitally native. And that means that the capacity to use digital tools, technologies, infrastructure and leapfrog, what you're seeing in other parts of the world, that's very real. 50%, more than that, 50%-60% of the world's global, electronic payments on a mobile phone happen in one country.
Mm.
That's India. 50% happen in India. 5, 10 years ago, India didn't have any. It was mostly Alipay and WeChat, it was in China. But if you look at digital infrastructure, digital tools, the willingness to embrace things digitally, Asia is at a completely different place from other parts of the world. So because the megatrends are still there, I think that a slow Asia grows at 4.5, 5%.
Mm.
And, you know, 35-40% of global GDP is in this region. You know, 4.5-5% growth is not shabby compared to any other part of the world. A slow China grows at 4-5% on an $18 trillion economy, that's $1 trillion of growth. And, you know, what's wrong with $1 trillion of growth? So fundamentally, I think the, the, you know, long-term, this thing is there. Now, like I said, within that, there are cycles.
Mm.
In the early part of the decade, 3, 4, 5 years ago, for us, China was a big driver of the growth. China outbound, the renminbi trade, the Chinese companies going internationally. The last 3, 4 years, we've been treading water in China, but India, Indonesia, the other big markets, they've picked up the momentum. So there are enough economies with enough diversification to be able to actually-
Mm.
-build a very balanced book of businesses if you have the balance in your business. We've seen that. So while there is some slowdown, but it's sporadic, Singapore will, you know, grow 2% this year, but that's up from 1%. Hong Kong will grow about 2% this year, and that's down from 3%.
Mm.
Taiwan will grow 4% this year. China will grow 4%-5% this year. Indonesia will grow 5% this year. India will grow 7%-8% this year. So, you know, the underlying economies are not bad. And in fact, they've also shown a lot more resilience. In the past, Asian Financial Crisis, the GFC, the Asian economies tended to be more fragile, particularly to a strong dollar and rising rates. And so you find, you know, the Asian Financial Crisis, the baht sold off, the rupiah sold off, the Korean won sold off. In the 20 years since then, I think every Asian economy doubled down and created a far more resilient system. So reserves are much higher. Every country has a reasonable 8-12 months of import cover.
Debt is much lower, both public debt, the fiscal situations are much stronger, leverage in the system is lower. Consumer leverage is lower other than a couple of countries. And so, on the whole, the financial architecture stability in the system gives them a lot more resiliency than they used to have. So in this cycle, with rates going where they are and the strong dollar, none of the Asian countries have really felt the impact of that materially. Sorry, long answer.
No, but it's a good answer, and I think you provided a real double click into the drivers that are gonna fuel, you know, that 4%-7% growth in GDP. And the compelling trend there is the growth of the middle class, which I think you articulated very well, and we think is a huge driver of opportunity for us. You touched on geopolitics, and that's been a headwind for Asia in the last three years, and we hadn't seen that for decades before. Do you think that the current situation that we currently have, specifically as it relates to the U.S., China, but more broader than that, is this the new norm that we're gonna live with for the next decade? Is it gonna get better, or is it gonna get worse?
I'm not Kishore Mahbubani. I'm not a political scientist, so I can tell you first off, my read on it, and take it for what it's worth. I think we're not... My own take is we're not going into a bipolar world situation.
Mm-hmm.
I think the chances are we're going into a multipolar world, and this is not unusual. If you think about Europe in the nineteenth century, and if any of you remember studying European history, I used to be constantly confused about who was siding with whom and against whom.
Mm.
And every 20 years in the war, France would be with Prussia, with Germany, and then they'd tie up with Britain, and so it was all issues based. I think we're going to a world where you'll have a couple of this, and part of the people will be issues based. And you're finding that there are people who had already been demonstrated, Saudi Arabia-
Mm.
India, ASEAN as a bloc, they're quite happy to try and play both sides. You take India, it's so interesting, you know? I come from there, but they're part of the quad, where they signed up with the US. They're also part of BRICS, and they signed up with China. Their largest trading partner is China, even though the army is facing each other at the border. So, you know, when somebody asked the Indian Foreign Minister, "You know, if you're pushed to it, which side will you choose?" He said what I thought was very smart. He said, "We are 1.4 billion people, we make our own side.
Mm.
So I think this multipolar thing, which is issues-based, will be there, but what that means is there'll always be a possibility of friction on issues. Now, it's challenging because countries will have to navigate better.
Mm.
Asia has been blessed for 40, 50 years with a very peaceful and calm geopolitical environment. The U.S. presence was very helpful, growth was nice. So I think there'll be more frictions. So let's start with that. But will these be at a level that they displace the capacity of these countries to operate? I don't think. I know, somebody once told me, I like, "Asia grows at night when the governments are asleep.
Mm.
Right? And so which is exactly what happened, right? Thailand has had more changes of government since the Second World War than any country except Italy.
Mm.
Its average growth rate, 5%. Right? So then Malaysia, politics is a mess. Growth rate, 5%. So I think the capacity of the region to continue to propel will be driven by the mega trends. And so geopolitics matters, but I don't think it'll displace things. Now, the other thing, China in particular, see a lot of people sort of look at the parallel with the Cold War. So will there be an Iron Curtain? You know, do you get two competing systems? You've got to reflect that the entire Soviet bloc at that time had single-digit portion of global GDP. It was 5%-7% of global GDP. You can create a bloc when it's a small portion of global GDP. China is the largest trading partner to 120 countries in the world.
How do you extricate 120 countries' largest trading partner and say, "Okay, we're going to isolate the bloc"? It's much harder to do. And if you look at most of Asia, you know, we're the largest, the largest trading partner to eight ASEAN countries, but also to countries like India and Australia, where you could say that there's geopolitical tensions, but business continues, and it doesn't sort of stop. So I think it's going to be hard to create a complete bloc. There will be areas, the semiconductor complex, the high tech, where people will put friction, there'll be noise, you know, but I don't see this as a showstopper, fundamentally.
Right.
I think that China has issues, and maybe we can talk about that later. People say, "What happens if Trump wins?" It looks like he will. But if you exclude the rhetoric, and Trump's rhetoric is obnoxious, but if you exclude the rhetoric, and you look under that to the policies-
Mm.
You look at the policy framework that the Democrats have run for the last two, three years relative to the... There's not that much to choose from. Trump, Trump is a deal maker. He'll raise tariffs upfront, then he'll try and cut a deal to get in the papers and cut tariffs on selective things. You know, business goes on, right? You know, my last, I'll tell you an anecdote to tell you how, right here. We have one of our clients here in Hong Kong, is the manufacturer of Christmas trees. You know, the, he, he claims he's got 70% of global market share in Christmas trees. Every Walmart you go to, the Christmas tree you buy is, like, from him.
For some reason, in the Trump administration, they put Christmas trees on the tariff list or the banned list. I thought maybe they thought the cones of the tree could be made into missiles.
Security threat.
Or, God knows what. Anyway, so they put it on the tariff list. So I asked him, "So, you know, what do you do?" Now, I know he has another plant in Mexico, so I assumed that he'd dial up the production in the Mexico plant. And he said, "No, no, I tried that. It doesn't work, because it is 30% more expensive to do stuff in Mexico and 30% less efficient. I lost productivity and increased costs." So I said, "Then what do you do?" He said, "Well, I just acquired some land near Jakarta Airport, and it's a large acreage, and I pretty much make the tree over here. I ship it to Jakarta, I rebrand it, and we ship it from Indonesia all over the world. And everybody knows, so it's transparent.
I'm not hiding anything, but it's Indonesian goods." Now, you can see this in the underlying data. Chinese exports into Southeast Asia have gone up. Southeast Asian exports to the U.S. and the West have gone up, but Chinese direct exports to the U.S. have gone down. So my general theory is that geopolitics matters, don't get me wrong, but I think by and large, the underlying momentum of business, the region, et cetera, et cetera, I think that's got adequate momentum.
So it's a more challenging environment, one that needs to be navigated delicately, but not one that will derail the opportunity for Asia. So you talked... You touched on China, and China has been in a more challenging environment. It's used to growing between 7% and 9%, more recently 4%-5%, if you believe the numbers that are being quoted. And it's a market where it has been feeling and certainly receiving a lot of pain. The real estate market's been one that's challenged. It's clearly, you know, being impacted by the tariffs that are being imposed on it, and so on. Have we seen China bottom in terms of its economic pain, or is there more pain to come?
So in the short term, you know, China's big problems are well known. The real estate is a real problem. They've got massive leverage and significant overcapacity in large parts of the system and complex. The question is, you know, how do you try to work out of it? In similar oversupplied situations in the U.S., or look at the Spanish real estate crisis, the market clearing price that was needed to get rid of that excess was a really sharp drop. You know, you needed prices to be off by 50%-60% to clear the market. The Chinese don't want to do that because they're trying to balance the social consequences of, you know, huge erosion in wealth.... but at the same time, they're conscious of what Japan did, which is kick the can down the road, and then it takes you 30 years.
So they don't want to do that either. So they're trying to do this sort of in-between thing, and I was really interested with the policy they came out with 2-3 months ago, where they're really trying to take some of this old capacity onto the government books, effectively. So they said, "We'll pull out this thing, and we'll essentially buy some of the stock and keep it." And because the government, like Japan, you know, if you're issuing, taking local currency debt, the debt capacity is infinite. This is not foreign currency debt, so you can just spend. So it's an interesting way to deal with it, but the numbers that they put behind it were not staggering. So I think if they really want to go down that path, they're going to have to commit a lot more fiscal resource to being able to do that.
So they might wind up there, I thought. My own view is that the property cycle will take at least another 3-5 years to clear.
Mm.
If they get it right, it'll take 3-4 years to do.
Mm.
Because real estate is still 30%-35% of Chinese GDP, an overhang on the property side will continue to spill over into everything else in China. So that's one decision. I'm not sort of. Well, the view that you'll see a quick bounce back in the property space. Having said that, I do think that they put a floor under the market now. So all of the policies they put in the last 12 months are actually making sure that you not continue to see a precipitous decline, right? And so I think there is a little bit of floor. There is some upsides. Some of the industries that they doubled down on, they're really doing extremely well.
Mm.
So obviously, the entire renewable complex, and last year they put 80 gigawatts of renewable energy. That's more than the whole world, right? So it's a massive growing industry. The EV complex, there just, there'll be consolidation, but underlying, you look at the cars they're creating, they're just mind-boggling.
Yeah.
You know, the NIOs and the BYDs and so on. Fabulous cars! You look at what they're doing in the high-tech space, they don't... So some of the industries, they're really creating cutting-edge stuff, so I think there are real pockets of opportunity around that. So the big question to me, personally, is what they need to fix and they've not been able to fix is a confidence problem, right? And confidence is more about sentiment than it is about... They've got good policies which are putting a floor. I think they know, and they've got debt capacity. They've got fiscal resolve. The-- what they don't have is confidence, and it's on both sides. They're lacking confidence, obviously, in the international community, so most of the companies represented in the room have reduced allocation to China, right?
People are, by the way, in the last couple of months, people have been nibbling back because valuations are just so attractive, right, as they achieve. So people are nibbling back, but generally speaking, the big scheme of things, they've lost international confidence. To me, the more worrying thing is they've also not been able to revive domestic confidence.
Right.
So the domestic consumer, domestic investor, et cetera, is also not very confident about putting money to work. So they need something to fire up this domestic confidence issue, which typically means you've either got to prop up the stock market to create a wealth effect or you've got to prop up the property. You need something to catalyze that, and they've not done that yet. Now, to me, therefore, the bigger way, the bigger question on China, right, honestly, are really the five-year questions.
Mm.
And the five-year view, you can be in one of two camps, right? You can be in the camp, which essentially says that President Xi, the status quo, he's from the Lenin, Stalin school, the party matters most, and as a consequence, they're just not comfortable with the market economy. And so it's a, it's a real shift from Deng Xiaoping, whose thing was, you know, the market will determine it, and, you know, it doesn't matter to me whether the cat is black or white, as long as the cat catches mice. That was the Deng Xiaoping philosophy. So there is a school which says that he's trying to effectively go back to a, a more planned economy construct.
If that is actually the case, then I think the challenges for China will be interim, because we know that, by and large, planned allocation of capital is always, sooner or later, becomes suboptimal.
Mm.
Right? It doesn't work. The alternative camp, which by the way, I'm in as well, is actually some of the things they're trying to do are very constructive for China if you have a 10-, 15-, 20-year view on a country. China had fantastic growth for 25 years, but what China did not put in place is the soft infrastructure that requires you to support growth of this sort. Every developed country in the world, you know, you look at the U.S. as an example, it took them 100 years to build some of the soft infrastructure.
Mm.
1920s, they had oligopolies and monopolies. They had to get rid of the robber barons. They had to do the AT&T restructuring. They had to change their view on, corruption. They had to put in a whole bunch of controls. So you look at what Xi's trying to do. I think he's taken a lesson from the Singapore book. Lee Kuan Yew cleaned up corruption in Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s, and there's been the singular difference between Singapore and every other Southeast Asian country. There's no corruption. I think that he took a lesson from that, that we've got to try and make sure that we drive corruption out of the system. He took a view on oligopolistic and monopolistic practices, and he tried to say, "Okay, how do I take this and not give oligopoly power," and so on.
They're trying to do some of this stuff. If you believe in the camp that what they're doing is constructive, then you've got to figure out in 5-7 years you'll get to a better China.
Mm.
Now, it's not a straight journey. It'll not be a linear journey because of what I said. If you lose confidence in the people, you know, without a short term, you don't have a long term. So if they screw up the short term, they might not get to the long term.
Yeah.
But, I think if they're trying to do it for the right reasons, they have capacity to be able to navigate-
Mm.
- from here to there.
Yeah, and your point around confidence, I think, is spot on. The savings rates in mainland China are at-
... historic highs. But, you know, we're starting to see a little bit of that confidence start to come back, and consumers are getting more, active with investing their money and talking about options to diversify their portfolio and look at, how they can actually build and create wealth. So hopefully that is, a pivot point.
Actually, that's true. Our first quarter in China was very strong.
Mm.
Including in the consumer wealth space. I can see some of what you're saying.
Right.
The Chinese are beginning to travel again.
Yeah.
We're seeing them around the region. They're not spending the kind of money they were spending earlier, so they're, you know, the wallet size slightly lower, but you're beginning to see the green shoots come back.
Yeah.
I would agree with that.
No, I agree with that. We go from here to many of us are gonna be moving to Jakarta for a day there with our business and the team there. DBS has a great business in Indonesia. Indonesia has always represented a tremendous opportunity, one of the most populated countries in the world, 250-odd million people. Jokowi and the government there has done a tremendous job building an infrastructure, but also taking a significant percentage of the population out of poverty. How optimistic are you about the Indonesian economy? They've just had new elections. Does that encourage you, or does it discourage you?
I think I want to start with history. When we were together in the Citibank days, in the mid-1990s, I was asked to run the strategy group for the emerging markets to figure out, you know, where we should allocate capital. And we sort of sat in Oxford, and we worked with some dons, and we did all the usual macroeconomic data and so on. And at the end of the exercise, the number one country in the world to invest in, ahead of Brazil, Russia, India, China, was Indonesia, number one, for all the reasons you cited. Fantastic demographics, great resource base, fantastic population, et cetera, et cetera. Despite that, if you look at history, Indonesia has always underperformed. They grew at 5%. Indonesia should grow at 7%.
Mm.
They give up a couple of percentage points of growth. And, you know, you can argue, I think they do it for two, three reasons. One, the education system in Indonesia has been inadequate, so they have good primary education, but the tertiary education is not that great, and therefore, talent has always been a challenge in Indonesia. The second big issue is that their rule of law, the judicial system, has been opaque, and therefore, I think you give up something on account of that as well, right? So it's underperformed. Now, what are the pluses? I think one of the least appreciated stories in Asia, in over the last two, three decades, has been Indonesia's transition to democracy.
Mm.
It is not easy for a country of that size, with the demographics they have, a large Muslim population, a young population, many of them study in the madrasas in the schools. There's a degree of militancy out in the extreme right, and despite all that, they've made a fantastic and successful transition to a democratic system, where every five years they have elections, they have a peaceful change of government, and there's continuity in that system.
Uh.
And now this is about 25 years plus they've been doing that. I think that's a great story. And in the second underlying part of the story, they've also created economic policy continuity. So whether it was now with Jokowi or, you know, earlier with SBY or with presidents in the past, you haven't seen huge vacillating from one point another. You tweak up some, et cetera, but there've been consistency in policy. I'm encouraged that at the end of the day, you know, Jokowi and his son, et cetera, are all part of this new administration, so there is this people coming together. So I do expect large parts of continuity in what they're trying to do. I think what you said is correct, right? Jokowi has been very good about driving investment and infrastructure.
So 18-20 ports, airports, toll roads, you know, the railway links, et cetera. I don't see that changing.
Mm.
Right? I think they will continue to do that. They've been fortunate in some ways. The timing has been good. The switch to EVs and the renewable complex means the nickel has gone from $6 billion to $30 billion of exports. They've got a third biggest... The biggest nickel resource in the country, in the world. They're number 3 for cobalt, so they've got a lot of great resources. But they've done well in not just mining the stuff and shipping it out, but building the downstream, the processing facilities, the smelting facilities, and so on. So that's creating a whole-
Mm
... range of economic activity in the system. And so some of that is spilling out. Like you said, you know, they've now got 120 million middle-class people, and it was half of that a decade ago. So a lot of people are beginning to hit their stride into that, middle class, in Indonesia. And so for us there, you know, we're focused on 4 markets in Asia, really, India, China, Indonesia, and Taiwan. They're the biggest markets in Asia, and ex-Korea. And, for us, we continue to see great growth. You know, Indonesia business is growing double digits, grew 20%, I think, last year. We make, mid-teen returns in that country. And again, because of the nature of the youth, the digital distribution in that country is a real winner.
Mm.
So...
Yeah, we would share that perspective, and we're quite excited-
Yeah
... to share with the people that are gonna be joining us to on our trip to Jakarta, why we're excited not just about the business that we've built, but also where we see the future of that marketplace. So I wanna pivot to our partnership, and from Manulife's perspective, we couldn't be happier. We started our partnership in 2016, covers a variety of markets, and it's been incredibly successful for us. We've written $4.3 billion worth of premium since we started our partnership. It's transformed our business in Singapore. We had 5% market share before we joined with DBS, and today we have more than 20% on a given quarter. And then from an Asia perspective, our banker contribution went from about 16% to 38% as at 2023.
So it's been a transformative partnership for our, for us, and one that we're, we're really very proud of. I'm gonna start with a question- which is centered on your selection process. You looked at many other Pan-Asian players when you selected Manulife. So apart from a very charismatic Manulife CEO of Asia, what was-
He was CEO at that time, right? So I don't think
CEO of Asia. CEO of Asia.
CEO of Asia.
CEO of Asia. What were the reasons why you selected Manulife?
This is actually going back in time. So for me, it's the same thing, where I look at every any M&A. You know, for me, it's almost like a M&A, right? It's a match. And if I remember, the three things that guided us. So first, obviously, the economics guide us. You know, you had to be competitive. But honestly, if I remember right, Manulife was not the biggest player or bidder in this thing. You weren't very far off, but it wasn't because of the economics. So for me, the second and third piece are actually a lot more important. The second piece for me is culture. I'm a big believer in marrying like cultures or cultures that you can work with.
We've given up on a couple of M&As in the last few years because I figured this culture is not going to work with ours, and you'll wind up giving up so much in the tensions that you create and creating the wrong, you know, incentive structures for people. It's not worth it. I liked what I saw first of all, in the Canadian culture, but then it wasn't just Canadian, because I also talked to your competitors at that time. But I liked what I saw in the Manulife culture, which I think is a win-win culture. And frankly, as I look back at our partnership, that's the one thing which stands out for me. That it's not been a one-way, right? Like, you know, we always have tensions between volume and profitability.
We have, you know, we're not tracking to what we said we would do. COVID came in. So you've got to have a partner that you can have a pragmatic discussion with and, you know, look at things and say, "Okay, what works? What does not work? What do we win? What do we lose?" And make trade-offs.
Mm-hmm.
Our call at that time was that Manulife would be a great partner because they're willing to have those discussions openly, upfront. And to me, that culture thing of having authenticity, honesty, trade-offs is very important. One of the things, and I'll come back to this, but one of the things in our partnership, for example, I think we both look at, and I certainly do, is my first question to my team is, you know, "How's Manulife doing? What's in it for them? Are they making money?" There's no point in my doing well if my partner is not making money, it's not going to work. But I think that works both ways, right? So that's a very big element of our decision-making process. The other element of our decision-making process is, you know, we had doubled down on digitization.
In 2013, as a company, we took a view that we're just going to go all in on the digital future, and we went all in. So we started investing a lot in our back-end systems. We moved from legacy to cloud systems, our middleware, our front-end. So by 2016, we were already named the world's best digital bank because we got 3 years of a lot of digital work behind us. I'm still of the view, and I said it in my opening comments, that particularly in Asia, given the demographics and the kind of people you're reaching out to, also given the expanse of the geographies, digital is the way to go.
Mm-hmm.
My other big rubric was I wanted a partner who was willing to invest with me in thinking customer journeys and actually thinking end-to-end digital. I'll be candid. I was actually quite surprised at the time that even though I thought the banks were so far behind, the insurance as an industry was 10 years behind the banks. And every insurance company I talked to was struck with how backward and how inefficient their processes were. Nothing had been digitized. So I was really looking for, within that, people who had the commitment to make the investment, had the green shoots of having done some stuff, and were willing to partner for the course. Frankly, as I said, that was the single biggest thing we decided to go with Manulife, was figured we could do digital together.
Again, as I look back at our partnership last 8 years, that's really worked. You know, do I give you some data? I'll tell you, Singapore, OCBC, our competitor bank, they own their own insurance company, and at the start of this journey, they had 35% of the bank insurance market, and we were like low teens. And they were using, apart from the branch system, relationship managers, agents and so on. And we figured we're going to have to try and do this differently and really take and build digital journeys to do it differently. And so together with Manulife, we've created some really extraordinary digital journeys, both from needs analysis, financial profile, all the way through to underwriting, creating product, delivery back in the hands of the customer, all in 4-5 days.
Today, we are running 35% market share bank insurance, and they're down to the 20s. In fact, one last quarter, quarter before, we were 38% or 39%. So this became, I think a large part of this was the digital capabilities that we built together.
Yeah. No, I would echo everything you said. I would say, first, it starts with the cultural alignment. You can't have a partnership that's going to last 15+ years unless you have strong alignment of cultures in terms of how people want to operate, and actually, it works better if people like each other. The second was the focus on digital, and as you said, when we launched our partnership, we actually put significant dollars aside so that we ensure that we are investing on both sides into the digital capabilities and also making it seamless. Most bank insurance partnerships across Asia work in a very manual way.
So the relationship manager at the bank basically pulls out the drawer when they have to talk about insurance, and it's a 35-page application form, and they painfully go through and fill it out, and then it goes to the insurance company, and it takes, like, 4 weeks to finally execute the sale. But for us, we connected our pipes into the DBS system, and it's basically the same application that's being used to sell a credit card is being used to sell an insurance product. And that was quite revolutionary, and it's only getting better with every year of advancements.
So one of the big improvements that we've seen, so apart from, you know, convenience is the first thing. It's got to be. If you're digital, you've got to make it convenient, and you've got to make it contextual. So it's got to be there when somebody wants it, et cetera. But the other big thing, which is really making a big difference now in the last three, four years, is the data and AI. So we've been able to leverage collecting this idea of figuring out how to use artificial intelligence to do the nudge or the conversation at the right time. So today, we're sending out 30 million nudges directly to customers every month. And the nudges, effectively, some of them are service nudges.
You know, it'll tell you, "Your electricity bill looks too high compared to everybody else around you," so you just feel good about it. But a lot of the nudges are really, contextual opportunities to do business. And so the nudge will look at, you know, what you've been reading, whether you're interested in this thing, what protection you have, and based on that, we'll send you a nudge saying, "You know, you might want to look at XYZ, you know, either investment or insurance or retirement product," and so on. And then, for the affluent segment, we don't send it directly to the consumer. We send it to the RM, relationship manager. So that's called next best conversation, so NB and NBC. The next best conversation goes to the RM, but the same thing, saying, "Hey, this is what we think your customer is interested in.
This is what we think..." The system does all that. "And, yeah, this is the conversation that you should have, and this is how you might want to lead the conversation through this channel." So we're working extremely well, and we've been able to plug in a lot of our insurance, both protection product, retirement product, savings product, and nudges through the process. It's been actually. The response rate, you can visibly measure. There's a lift. We do a simple way of measuring. We have a control group where we don't use any nudges, and then we measure everything else compared to that. And, you know, last year, we effectively figured we had about $350 million of economic value creation, of which more than half was invest planning advisory, of which a substantial portion is, insurance and protection.
Yeah, I know the digital connection between the organizations is a standout leadership position that we have. I would argue the third ingredient, beyond culture and digital, is that the commercial terms that we have create an alignment. You know, again, the challenging part of a banker agreement is that the banks typically want to sell-
Volume.
Low margin products, and the insurance company wants high margin, and that is always the source of friction. But we came up with a construct where the compensation was very much linked to the value for the insurance company. And again, that was something that, that you agreed early, Piyush, which I think has been also a driving force. I think we agreed that when we're at the, at the leadership team meeting on a monthly basis, reviewing results, we never want to be in a situation where one party's happy and the other one's unhappy. It's either we're both happy or we're both unhappy, because that's the only way that you're going to solve the problems. I'm going to pivot. Just one last question before I open to the floor.
Insurance is clearly still a very low penetrated product in Asia, and that's true globally, but more so in Asia. I know you've been very focused on really providing a comprehensive solution for your customers across all their different needs, and insurance is a part of that. Do you think that it's just because the products are so complex? Is it because maybe they're not digitally easy to execute? What's going to drive the next level of penetration improvement in relation to how we are able to offer insurance as a partnership?
So Roy, I've thought about this. I think one, there's a cultural dimension. People are a lot more fatalistic in Asia, frankly. So, you know, everybody in India is karmic, you know, so your karma will do what karma will do. But even elsewhere, the families have extended family support system. People count on that a lot. Indonesia, anything, probably go back to the kampung and, you know... So you don't worry about stuff because culturally, the downside of having a strong extended family support system is you're less self-reliant, so there's a cultural dimension to it. There's a consequence, the way insurance has been sold by us has been push, right? Which is why the agency forces, you look at your competitors here, and they've got millions of people pounding the streets, hustling to sell insurance.
When you're trying to push a product, but the underlying understanding of what is the consumer need is not there, and they don't see the need, so you're pushing the product, right? So I'm convinced that actually selling it the way we are selling it, which is a solution-oriented sale as part of a long-term retirement planning, or protection planning agenda, is the way to go. I think that's the only way to break this, and we're seeing the benefits of that already. You know, we don't push, we do the... I call it, we say, from cross-sell to cross-buy. How do you create the context in which the consumer recognizes that this is good for them, and why they should do it in a particular context?
You're training your bankers that way, you use data that way, and you push that agenda, and then you layer that and make it convenient. You use the digital tools on top of that. What you said is correct. Insurance, you know, I saw Swiss Re had this thing, I don't know how they count it, but they said the mortality protection gap is $120 trillion in Asia. It looks like a big number to me. I certainly know that life penetration ranges between 2%-8% in Asia. Non-life is, like, 1%-3%. So even relative to low penetration in other parts of the world, Asia is under-penetrated for insurance, but also the retirement. You know, I tell you, the two pockets of demographics. Even the average age in Asia is 27-28.
These countries, Japan, China, China in particular, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, 1/4 of the population will be over 60 now, right? Whereas you have these young countries, that's right. But this worry about retirement and also retirement plans, 4 of the most underfunded retirement plan countries in the world are right here. It is China, Japan, Australia, and Thailand. So we've reached a cusp and a point in time where this consumer need to think about the future, to think about their mortality, to think about their retirement, to think about estate planning, you know, the next generation path. It's all happening as we speak.
Yeah.
But you can't push the product. You have to pull the product through these kinds of sales process. I think that's what it takes, and I think we're doing the right thing together.
Yeah. And the education is certainly something that we've been focusing on collectively to try to help people understand why it's important. Ironically, to some extent, the pandemic has actually helped people appreciate why insurance is critical. I'm gonna now go to the floor. I wanna make sure that we have some time, at the very least, to answer questions that you might have. So please, if you could put your hand up. Meny.
It's, Meny Grauman from Scotiabank. Piyush, thanks for being here. Wondering, how does insurance fit into your overall strategy, and what the knock-on effects of your business are from these insurance sales?
Yeah. So, you know, wealth management is what we started off with. First, this thing was we got to be a wealth provider, and you think about wealth provision, a lot of people want to buy insurance as a retirement product, investment product, a part of their estate planning, looking after the next generation. Wealth planning, therefore, wealth management has been big for us. It used to be 5% of our business, today, it's 20% of the bank, and it's a fantastic high ROE business. It's really what's transformed DBS. It really-- We weren't in the top 30 private banks in Asia, today, we're number 3 in AUM and sales. And so it's been a big growth agenda for us. So that's the affluent rich base and the mass affluent base.
But on top of that, as we started scaling up, we figured that even in the mass market space, there's a real opportunity to change the economics, which is, frankly, we are really a balance sheet bank, and we take your deposits and we give you loans. But if you really want to maximize the customer value, then you've got to figure what are the other products and services you can offer even into the mass market base. And so a large part of the protection products, et cetera, fits very well in that base. They like to buy it, we like to be able to work with them because it improves the economics for us. So, collectively, the whole wealth management, 20% of our business, and the banker portion of that is rapidly growing.
7 years ago, we were making, I want to say 200-300 million bucks from banker. Today, it's like $600 million-$700 million bucks. So it's a fast growth business over this period of time. We sell the same, we sell about $1 billion of volume, but more than that, we will contribute meaningfully to our own bottom line as well. So that's from an economic standpoint. The bigger thing to me is from the customer standpoint. For me, at the end of the day, to be able to keep the customer relationship sticky, I have to be able to do more products with the customer. And it's one of the ways in which we compete with the digital banks, right? They come in with a very simple, you can do your payment or you can do your thing.
I offer a full service value proposition, and I found that the more digitally you can engage with the customer, the more they choose to do with you, and the more they do with you, the more sticky they are. So to me, the insurance product is a critical part of building and cementing the customer relationship and a longer-term customer value proposition.
Thank you.
Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital. I mean, if you like having an insurance company to partner with, what's stopping you from just buying one or developing one instead, then you don't have to share the economics, you get them all?
So we, you know, thought about it very hard, when we did the deal even before. I think the skill sets in manufacturing and running insurance are very different from the skill sets in distribution and customer engagement. They're not the same skill set. You could do that. You'd have to create a conglomerate. I could own an insurance company, and I could own an asset management company, but we chose, in the past, to focus on the customer side of the business, which is the distribution side of the business, knowing the customer and creating a customer value proposition that we could work with and go out to buy the products. So we do some internally, but whether it's mutual funds, I don't create them. I go to BlackRock and Blackstone.
Insurance, I go to the insurance partner to get it, and so on and so forth. I think, over the last 10, 15 years, the strategy has worked well for us. You know, we're generating 18, 19% return on equity. We are growing at double-digit bottom line. You know, we're growing at a strong single-digit top line. And by the way, I think we're outperforming most of our competitors who've tried to do all things together. I think it sometimes distracts you if you try to do a whole bunch of things and not focus on a singular core competency. But there are people who do everything and do it, you know, reasonably well. I just found that if you focus on where you think your competency is and what you want to build, you get better performance.
Hi, Doug Young from Desjardins. Just, you have a 15-year partnership. Just wanna understand, how do you approach renewing that partnership, the processes you go through, how do you think about it? And do you always take that partnership to market when you get to the end? I'm just trying to understand the steps you go through.
I haven't done this before, so I'm not sure I know the answer to that. But let me give you first an anecdote, right? So it was a 15-year partnership, and then COVID happened. And through COVID, I realized that, you know, because of everything that was happening, we weren't going to be able to deliver for Manulife what I was hoping to be able to deliver, right? In terms of getting customers. The customers were just completely shell-shocked. And so we went back to Manulife and said, "You know what? Let's extend this partnership one year, and I'm not going to charge you for extending it one year, because I think collectively, we owe it to each other that you benefit from it as much as I do," right? So that's the spirit in which we engage with this.
We're not just a dollar and cent kind of bank. We're not just a dollar and cent partnership. So we extended it one year just to make sure that the collective commitment we have, we can make it come good, right? I'm sure that you know, come the end of the decade, when somebody's going to look at it, hopefully not me by then, they will approach it with the same mindset. You know, I like to say we're a Asian kind of bank in the sense of, well, obviously, economics matter, but relationship matters a lot. And so we are the kind of bank that goes through cycles. We're happy to go through down cycles because we know there's enough cycles. So all the same things will matter. You know, we work well together, it's a good relationship, culture matters.
Now, we're also economically minded. If Manulife winds up underbidding everybody by 50%, of course, we'll look at another partner.
But I think that you raise some good points, and I think your example there, Piyush, just illustrates how, you know, each party is looking out for the interests of the other. And I think that goes back to the cultural alignment. And, you know, we often hear win-win and lose-lose, but very rarely does it get executed in a partnership, and I'm proud to say that actually, for our partnership, it is one that is very much the way we think about it. And I think the other objective that we both have is that we make this partnership so successfully valuable to both institutions, that the friction to actually work with another party would be painful for both of us, and I think that's exactly the goal that we're working towards. Any last questions? I think we can wrap it there.
So what I'd like to do is just offer a huge thank you to you, Piyush, firstly, for joining us. Secondly, for sharing some phenomenal insights. I think we all come away with a lot deeper in knowledge of the markets in Asia and actually your perspectives as it relates to how things are going to unfold over the next 5-10 years. And then, obviously, the huge thank you to you for the leadership that you provide for our partnership. Please, if I could ask you all to put your hands together for Piyush Gupta.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Roy and Piyush. I hope you enjoyed the discussion. It's very insightful to me. It's very important to acknowledge the fact that how we offer solutions to our customers with our partners, such as with DBS. And I cannot find another transition to do this, because the digital focus that we have for both DBS and us really, really bring to life. And now, I would like to, in a moment, welcome Karen Leggett, our Global Chief Marketing Officer, as well as Jody Wallace, our Chief Analytics Officer, coming on stage to talk about our digital customer leadership strategy.
In addition to a presentation, Jody is actually going to walk us through a live demo showcasing some of our in-flight opportunities to use generative AI, which is obviously a buzzword these days, but we want to showcase to you how we are using that at Manulife and create value. With that, Karen?
Good morning! As we head into the home stretch, Jody and I are very excited to be hosting this session this morning. As Global CMO, a critical part of my mandate is accountability for our digital customer transformation and AI, two areas experiencing rapid change and innovation and generating a high degree of interest. On the back half of the session, Jody will explain to us and demonstrate how we are scaling deployments in generative AI to lead against our competitors, and I'll start with a progress update on our digital customer transformation. Our transformation has evolved the way we work, the way we innovate, and the way we scale and deliver value. As I take you through our journey, there's really two key differentiators that I want to highlight.
Firstly, in addition to the CAD 1 billion we invested prior to 2023, we have now committed another CAD 1 billion as part of an enhanced programmatic approach to digital customer leadership, and this approach is underpinned by detailed roadmaps leading us through 2023- 2025, developed at the line of business level and globally governed. Secondly, the material investments we have made in cloud, data, and AI capabilities and skill sets are allowing us to execute faster than our peers. So let's take a look back at where we started in 2018. The progress, as you can see, has been striking. Some notable highlights: we are now leading in the majority of our business lines in relationship NPS, which we know to be the barometer of customer experience.
We've achieved an STP rate of 85%, up from only 68% in 2018, and digital has become the dominant channel for customer servicing interactions, allowing us to deepen our customer engagement while transforming our cost base. These accomplishments have actually created significant tailwinds, enabling us to deliver $185 million in financial benefits in 2023 alone, and our momentum has us on track to deliver $500 million by the end of this year. Our focus on STP is a critical lever to transform our cost base through automation and digitization of manual processes. One example of that is our migration to a global contact center platform, and this allows us to divert call center interactions to digital, thereby reducing our unit costs.
These unit cost reductions in the first year of deployment of the platform are in the magnitude of 12%-20%, and we are on track to complete Asia, GWAM, and Canada in Q3 of this year, thereby expecting further upside. I always like to caution that build it and they will come doesn't always work. Automation and digitization give us the value only if customers adopt, if they start digital and they stay digital. And as a result, we've developed very detailed adoption plans that accompany our three-year roadmaps. We're rigorously tracking global adoption metrics that we've developed at the bottoms-up perspective from the line of business, rolled up to the segment, rolled up globally, and we are competitively benchmarking ourselves to ensure that we understand how we are leading.
How this translates is that we've actually automated 53% of our customer servicing processes globally, and that represents 69% of our total global servicing volume. This is reflective of us actually, in a disciplined way, tackling automation of highest volume transactions, which gets us to the 69%. Now we're pivoting to tackle less frequent, but still high-cost manual processes, and so that clearly delivers more upside. One of the key levers to driving adoption is our market-leading mobile apps. We've made significant progress over the last three years, improving experiences on our mobile apps, and that has resulted in us exceeding our peer average in mobile app ratings in every segment.
And so beyond the impact, the NPS, the reason this is important, it's important from a cost perspective, because our mobile adoption data shows us that mobile users are four times more digitally active than web-only users. We've also delivered competitively differentiated solutions for our customers. For example, in our U.S. business, and Brooks will get into this in a lot more detail, our Vitality Plus Customers digitally engage with us over 24 times per month. That's huge. That allows us to increase upsell, cross-sell, and improve persistency. As you know, most insurers are lucky to speak to their customers once, once a year or once every two years. Another example is the migration of our group benefits customers to a new claims platform that instantly adjudicates between 92%-95% of claims, up from 65% today.
Then lastly, right here in our largest market in Asia, in Hong Kong, we provide a seamless, integrated digital experience for our insurance and wealth and asset management customers. As I mentioned earlier, we've also made meaningful investments in our cloud infrastructure and data capabilities with 100% of our data lakes and AI models, as well as 71% of our apps now in the cloud. The reason that this matters is that the impact of these investments has actually reduced our time to provision infrastructure from 60 days down to 3. Our infrastructure costs for compute and storage have been reduced by 30%, allowing us to reinvest those savings in our digital customer transformation.
This is a step change from where we were, but most importantly, these capabilities are allowing us to rapidly scale and capitalize on innovation opportunities, such as GenAI, faster than our peers. These investments have also allowed us to democratize innovation across our company through deploying GenAI productivity tools to our entire employee base in the last 60 days. We also have a very strong position in traditional AI. It's odd that we now talk about traditional AI, having deployed over 103 models across our businesses. We've moved well beyond piloting in GenAI. You're gonna read a lot and hear from competitors. Everyone's piloting in GenAI. We are actually live and scaling multiple global use cases. The impact of these investments is facilitating the deployment of proprietary tools, such as our Intelligent Customer Data Platform and what we call Voice.
These are proprietary tools that give us a complete view of customer interactions on a near real-time basis. That is important because otherwise you only survey about 1%-2% of your customers. Injected all the contact center transcripts, digital footprint, holdings, interactions, et cetera. This level of granularity not only allows us to pinpoint with high accuracy where customer friction points are or customer irritants are, but it also allows us to address those in an accelerated way. We believe this is another reason that is another factor that is contributing to our leadership and relationship NPS, where, in 11 of 16 markets, we are leading. We're also, in the last year, month-over-month, experiencing record-high transactional or tNPS results.
So in summary, we've made material progress in our digital customer leader transformation, and it's giving us high confidence in our ability to achieve accelerated performance in the future. So let's pivot and look at where we go from here. So we will continue to raise the bar on customer experience, on value delivered, and operational excellence. As I mentioned earlier, we've already delivered $185 million in 2023 in financial benefits and are on track to deliver $500 million by the end of this year. And in total, we expect to deliver $1.5 billion in financial benefits from our 2023- 2025 roadmaps, which over a five-year time horizon, equates to a 3x return. We'll continue to focus on digitization and automation, and we'll improve our STP from 85%- 88% by the end of next year.
We're also confident that we will meet our +37 target for RNPS by the end of 2027. If you recall, we were at only +1 on RNPS and 68% STP in 2018. Then lastly, we're already beginning work on the next set of three-year roadmaps that'll cover 2026 through 2028. So we're confident in achieving these outcomes because of our diverse set of capabilities. The impacts of automation, digitization, and adoption are already well anchored in our roadmaps and in our plans, but we expect further tailwinds from the deployment and scaling of lead generation and personalization, which you heard Piyush speak of. I wanna share a couple of examples to bring this to life.
As I mentioned, we have detailed adoption plans that identify areas where we can significantly improve digital engagement, and one such area is in U.S. retail plan administrators who submit member contributions. We were able to double adoption from 34%- 69% in an 8-week period with a targeted outreach campaign. I see Aimee here in our Canada retirement business. We used personalization through in-app notification to encourage customers to update their banking information or add their banking information, and we've doubled adoption from 34%- 51% in a 90-day period. As you can imagine, that reduces calls to the contact center, reduces the issuance in mailing a check, and is obviously a much better customer experience.
With respect to digital leads, we made a decision in late 2022 to in-house our digital media buying because we felt we could drive better outcomes internally. In the first full year of operation, in 2023, we improved our total costs and significantly improved our efficiency. It's still early days. We're still nascent in digital lead generation, but we actually decreased our digital media spend, we improved our targeting, we drove 14% more leads, we converted 10% more leads, and we did it at a 49% lower cost. And so that positions us very well to scale our spend and scale our impact as it relates to digital lead generation. And lastly, the early results from our GenAI deployments are really highly promising.
To demonstrate that, I'm now gonna turn it over to Jody, to show how our talent and our investments are enabling speed, efficiency, and innovation in the GenAI space. Jody?
Thanks so much, Karen. I am so excited to talk to you about how we're embedding GenAI as a strategic capability across our organization, and show you one of the great solutions that we've launched recently. So what is it that's enabling us to deliver GenAI solutions? Well, we have a deep talent pool with a team of about 190 data scientists and machine learning engineers. 80% of our AI talent is embedded in our businesses and functions, which allows close alignment to business priorities. In generative AI specifically, we are well past the phase of experimentation, as Karen noted. We have identified over 240 use cases, we've deployed seven use cases into full scale production, and we have another 16 coming live in the next few months.
We're also combining GenAI with traditional AI or machine learning and integrated solutions, like in underwriting, where we're using GenAI to interpret and summarize physician statements, and then using machine learning to make decisions. In sales, and you'll see this in a few minutes, we're using machine learning to generate leads, nudges, as Piyush called them, and score those leads, and then using GenAI to create personalized talking points and communications. Others we speak to in our industry have also identified use cases, and some have launched tool sets to drive productivity. We believe we are differentiated in three ways. First, our investments in our data and AI platforms have really set us up for success. Second, our programmatic approach is allowing us to move with speed and scale across the organization, and we are on the agenda of our most senior leaders.
And third, we have a track record of successfully creating value from AI. We launched our AI practice, coincidentally, the same year that we did the DBS deal in 2016, and now we have data scientists and ML engineers embedded in all of our businesses and functions. In the last three years, we doubled the value we deliver from AI by improving our throughput through enhanced tooling and skills development, and also diversifying our portfolio of AI solutions. All of this is underpinned by a responsible AI framework and a set of AI principles that guides everything we do. Outside of our AI practice, we also have the broader organizational ingredients for success. We have leadership from the top, with a hands-on approach to GenAI from Roy and the leadership team.
We align all of our AI activities with our code of business ethics, commitment to customers and employees, and our position on sustainability. We take a cross-functional approach to GenAI as well, recognizing this can't be owned by a technology team alone. Finally, we design our solutions with transparency in mind, so we're clear about when and how we use AI, and so we can provide clear explanations for the GenAI responses that we generate. Late last year, we rolled out GenAI awareness and training for our leaders and our people, and earlier this year, we launched a program to elicit use cases from all employees. We have collected over 240 use cases, with over 20 of them either deployed to production or in development. Let me give you a few examples.
We deployed an AI productivity tool called ChatMFC for our 38,000 employees for use in their day-to-day activities. In our Canadian business, we're using GenAI to summarize call transcripts, and Karen mentioned this, and then using traditional machine learning models to model trending topics. This provides management a daily view of emerging issues, both in advance of NPS surveys, and on every interaction instead of the 1%-2% that we survey, and we're going to scale this capability to all North American contact centers by the end of 2024. In the US, in our annuities business, we have deployed a contract lookup solution for complex contracts. We receive, in this particular contact center, about 360,000 calls a year. Previously, customer service agents had to navigate between multiple systems for policy information, for state regulation, for contract details.
With GenAI, they can now get a summary of coverage depending on the specific question that the caller is asking about. This both delivers a better customer experience, 'cause we're answering the question much more quickly, and provides greater efficiency as well. And we supplement the responses with two things: One, we provide the agent with sources, particular snippets in the contract where the answer came from, so they can double check it or read it for themselves. And two, we provide them with confidence scores from the AI model, so they know how likely is this to be the right answer, or do I need to intervene? In our first month, we already saw a 5% improvement in average handle time, which is pretty significant in a high volume contact center.
This has now been rolled out to two U.S. contact centers that handle a total of 1.23 million calls per year, and will deploy to an additional five contact centers this year alone. But it's not sufficient just to roll out tools. Culture and behavior change are key to driving value from any transformation, we know that, but particularly in the GenAI world. Like Karen said before, "Build it, and they will come," does not always work. Our goal is to embed GenAI as an organizational capability, not just as a set of tools, with a broad adoption program that will democratize use for all of our employees. We delivered a communications hub. Employees can participate in our program of crowdsourced idea generation, and they can access self-service learning about GenAI.
We're also deploying tailored hands-on workshops for teams to help them develop their own prompts and their own GenAI skills that are relevant to their jobs, and the program is working. We've seen a usage increase in terms of transactions, but also in terms of the breadth of the user base across geographies, levels, and roles. And I love this. I was looking at our usage statistics before coming over to Hong Kong, and as of the end of May, our top 10 users of our GenAI tools include a client account representative in our retirement business, a full stack engineer, a talent acquisition manager in Canada, and a marketing director in Hong Kong. I'm trying to get on the list of top 10, but I haven't put in enough prompts yet.
Now I am excited to move over here to this iPad and provide you with a live demo of one of the GenAI tools that we recently launched for Singapore sales agents. These capabilities have been rolled out to 220 agents across six branches so far, and will ramp up to 2,000 agents in the next few weeks. I'm going to show you how we incorporate machine learning or traditional AI together with generative AI, as well as insights from our intelligent customer data platform. I'm going to show you how easy we have made it for our agents to increase their engagement with customers on topics that are meaningful in the moment, personalized, and in the language and tone that is most comfortable for the agent.
And I'm going to show you how we have kept the power in the hands of the agents, giving them choices on how to engage on their own terms. I'm going to switch hats now, so forget about Jody, the Chief Analytics Officer. I'm now Jody, the insurance sales agent, and I have six years of experience as a insurance advisor in Singapore. I joined Manulife two years ago from another firm. I have 92 customers, and I am able to connect with about 25 of those customers once every couple of months, and another 25 customers maybe twice a year. I'm gonna bring this live here for us. This is the homepage that I log into every day. There it is. And what I have here is some of my performance statistics and outstanding activities.
One of the first things I do each morning is I look at my leads, and these are leads generated by our machine learning models that show me the top customers to reach out to in terms of their propensity for new or follow-up opportunities. I'm gonna pick the first customer from the list, which is Chi Seng Hee. So what we have first is information about Chi Seng Hee, some insights about who he is and what he might be looking for. And what it's telling me here is that our next best recommendation engine is telling me that he has needs in life protection, critical illness, and retirement. But beyond telling me that he has needs in those areas, I'm provided with an explanation. Here's why we think he has needs in these areas.
I'm also provided with the most recent interactions that Chi Seng Hee has done with Manulife. You can see here he requested a fund switch in the app. He emailed us about reinvesting dividends, and he has a number of claims as well. So that's what I'm seeing. Now for the magic. I'm gonna go to generate, and I said earlier that we wanted to keep the power in the hands of the agents. As a matter of fact, that was feedback that they gave us while we were developing this solution.
So what we've allowed them to do, what we've enabled them to do, is to generate engagement ideas, how to talk to Chi, Chi Seng Hee in three different ways, one based on his life stage, needs, and gaps, one based on his most recent transactions, and one based on news articles or things happening in the environment. So we'll start with life stage, needs, and gaps. And here again, you can see, because our next best recommendation engine said critical illness, retirement, and life protection were his high needs areas, those are highlighted for me. I'm gonna pick life protection, and I'm gonna click Generate. What this is going to do, it's going to give me some background about Chi Seng Hee and why he has life protection needs.
It's then gonna tell me how I might engage with Chi Seng Hee on this topic, so we call it engagement ideas. Here it says: Suggest that he maintain his current needs or add on more for family and loved ones in the category of life protection. It's also suggesting I might highlight the importance of having adequate life protection coverage to safeguard against unforeseen circumstances. From there, I can go ahead and generate an email on this topic, and it'll present me with copy of an email that I can grab and put into Outlook. If I don't like how this sounds, if it doesn't quite sound like me, I can change the tone, make it more professional or more casual. Here it says, "I hope this email finds you well," et cetera, et cetera. I'll change it to something a little more casual.
Says, "I hope you're doing well," and it says, "I'd love to have a chat to understand your specific needs." So I can continue to regenerate the email as many times as I want until I find something that feels like me. Now, this is not scripted. The engagement ideas are not scripted, and the emails are not scripted. These are truly generated by our large language model, by our GenAI solution. I also have the ability to turn it into a text message, if that's how I like to communicate. And here, it'll shorten it and make it something I can fit into a text, and I have the ability, of course, to translate it, in this case, to Mandarin, with other languages coming soon. So that's one example.
I've just given myself lots of ways to engage with this customer based on his life stage, needs, and gaps. I'm gonna go ahead and show you another way that we can engage. So instead of life stage, needs, and gaps, I'm gonna pick customer activities. So I noticed that fund switch. Did you see that fund switch that he had done recently in the app? So I'm going to select the app transaction, and now it's gonna generate some, some engagement ideas based on him having made that fund switch. It gives me the background that he has... He made a fund switch on the twenty-seventh of May, and it tells me the implication is that the fund switch indicates that the customer is actively managing his investments and may be seeking better returns.
If I'm someone who normally sells life, life protection, this might be a new topic for me. So I'm gonna go ahead and generate an email, which will give me the text that I need to reach out to my customer. I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to reach out to acknowledge the recent fund switch you made. Your proactive approach to managing your investments is commendable, and I would love to understand more about your financial goals. So I can go ahead and send this. Again, I can change the tone to make it more professional, more casual. I can generate a text message or translate it. I'm going to give you one more example. I'm going to generate some talking points, some engagement ideas, and some email based on recent news, on news articles.
Recall one of the areas that we thought would be of interest to Chi Seng Hee was retirement planning. So I'm going to pick retirement planning, click Next. Now I'm going to get a list of articles that are related to retirement planning. I see there's one here around Guide to Retirement Planning for Young Adults. I like that one. I'm going to pick it, and then I could click the View Article and read it, or I can ask Generate to give me a summary of the article, which it will do. It'll give me the article summary, which says, "This provides a guide to retirement planning for young adults, emphasizing the importance of starting earlier," excuse me. And then it gives me the implications to this customer, specifically based on his age, his life stage, and the products that he already has.
I can again generate the email, and what I get here is an email that I can send to Chi Seng Hee. It includes the link to the article and, I can go ahead and send that. So to recap, what hopefully you've seen here is that we're using GenAI and machine learning models to make it really easy for agents to understand customer opportunities, but also to generate these personalized communications at the click of a button to help them engage with more customers more often. In our first two weeks live, about 68% of our agents had already used the new generate capabilities, and in July, we will be broadening that user base to about 2,000.
Based on our analysis in Singapore, we anticipate a 17% uplift in repurchase rates for our customer base when this is fully rolled out to all of our agents. It's still early days, so it's difficult to get a full picture of where this will go, but at a minimum, we expect to see about a 5% increase in APE sales impact across our businesses. In addition to these sales results, we're increasing the efficiency of our agents, and we're improving the effectiveness of recruiting to support the ambition that Phil talked about yesterday, and we are not stopping here. We have about 12 enhancements planned to this solution for the remainder of the year, including additional languages and new capabilities for recruitment managers.
One of the great pieces of feedback we received from our distribution transformation lead was that this is great for the sales agents, but it's also fantastic for the recruiting managers. We're also in the process now of scaling to Japan, to our U.S. wholesalers, and we have more businesses to follow. I hope you enjoyed that, and thankfully, it worked. The hotel Wi-Fi seems to be on our side today. With that, I'm going to turn it back to Karen.
So thank you, Jody. And in closing, there are three key takeaways we'd love to leave you with today. Firstly, as you saw from Jody's presentation, we are extremely well-positioned to lead in GenAI. Secondly, our programmatic and enhanced and disciplined approach to value generation, we will continue to execute in this way through 2028. And lastly, we also have confidence in the momentum of our future performance as we scale our investments in leading-edge capabilities that we shared with you today. And that is how we are raising the bar in our digital customer ambition. Thank you, and Hung, I will turn it back over to you.
Welcome back, everyone. Our next presenter is Naveed Irshad, President and CEO of our Canadian business. Since we're here in Hong Kong, it's natural that we spend a lot of our time talking about Asia business, but it's actually very important to talk about home market as well. Naveed will show us how we're going to win and help to service our customer in Hong Kong and Canada. With that, Naveed?
Thank you, Hung, and good morning. I'm really excited to be back in Asia. I spent four years in the region overseeing the transformation of our Singapore business. I just love the energy and vibrancy of Asia. But as a proud Canadian, I'm thrilled to be here to talk to you about Manulife Canada and how we're going to win in our home market. I'll take you on our journey of becoming the undisputed leading insurer in Canada. We're proud of the foundation that we've built. Our track record speaks for itself. We're already number one in core earnings in Canada relative to peers, and we'll look to increase the distance between us and our competitors. I'll talk about our winning strategy and why it's the right one for our business and for millions of our customers.
We've built a strong foundation with really solid fundamentals, and we're set up nicely for the next stage of growth. Looking back, we have a leading presence at home, a proven track record of delivery and execution, at-scale operating units with a very attractive product shelf, a culture of expense efficiency driven by win-win solutions for customers, and Canada is an attractive platform for growth. We have a broad coast-to-coast presence across Canada. We've been protecting Canadians for over 135 years. We serve 1 in 4 adult Canadians today. 3 million Canadians have multiple products with us. 5 million group benefit members depend on us. We have a broad distribution ecosystem with leading banks and financial advisors with a complementary offering, with significant overlap with insurance and wealth advisors. We have number one or number two market shares across the board.
Number 2 in group insurance. Number 1, excluding the Canadian Federal Employees Plan, which changed hands last year. Number 2 in retail individual insurance. Number 1 in group retirement. Number 2 in mortgage creditor. Number 1 in travel insurance. Number 1 in association and dental. These rankings are no accident. We have a proven track record of making the right decisions for our business. We have a clear right to win in Canada. We have a strong brand built on innovation, innovation that drives value for customers. We were the first company in Canada to underwrite using artificial intelligence. We were the first company to offer coverage to Canadians living with HIV. We were the first company to offer coverage to Canadians living with diabetes. We were the first company to offer lower premiums to non-smokers. We're the first company to embrace behavioral insurance through our Vitality program.
Vitality is now available on all our core retail insurance products. It drives better health and financial outcomes. You'll hear more about Vitality from Brooks in our next session. We have a top-tier product shelf, broad multi-channel distribution from independent advisors, consultants, brokers, travel agencies, right through to direct-to-consumer. Manulife Canada is significant. We represent 22% of the company's earnings. We have diversified and comprehensive product lines. We help protect Canadians' physical, mental, and financial health. Our current product shelf is a mix of short-term repriceable and long-term adjustable products, with minimal material long-term guarantees. Our bank has a high quality, fully secured, low credit risk portfolio. We have a track record of execution, strong earnings growth across the board, efficient capital deployment on new business, and efficient capital management on in-force.
That was highlighted by our, the largest UL transaction in Canadian history that we completed earlier this year. We're driving improved return on equity and consistent cash generation and remittances year after year. So I mentioned new business. We have a product shelf with an excellent risk-return profile. Management actions we've taken include new reinsurance agreements, new product launches, exiting certain higher risk product lines, targeted repricing in other product lines, claims management actions, underwriting modernization activities, and expense efficiency activities. This has driven really attractive returns, as you can see from the slide. Our product shelf is ready for distribution expansion. Now, I mentioned expense efficiency. We've developed a strong culture of expense management across the segment, primarily by driving the digital agenda, win-win solutions, better experiences for customers, and lower costs to the company.
We handled 56 million group insurance, health, and dental claims in 2020. It's 2020, at a unit cost of CAD 0.55. In this year, we'll handle 75 million at a unit cost of CAD 0.45. That's an increase in claims of 34% and an increase in expenses of only 9%. All the benchmarking we've done has shown us to be top of class, both in terms of unit costs and expense efficiency ratios. Expenses are a competitive advantage for us in product development. To summarize, we have a leading presence in Canada, a track record of execution at scale, diversified business units, a strong product shelf, a culture of expense efficiency driven by digitization, and we're tackling the future from a position of strength.
We're ready, and we have the right strategy in to truly win in our home market of Canada. Now, looking ahead is actually the exciting part. We're really well-positioned in Canada. Canada is an attractive platform for growth. We're gonna continue to focus on execution, we're gonna continue to focus on best-in-class offerings, and we'll drive step change on digital distribution and differentiation through health. That's how we've become the undisputed leader. We have a strong market position in Canada, but a potential to do a lot more. Canada has had record population growth driven by immigration. Underinsurance is prevalent in the newcomer segment. This resonates with me personally as a first-generation Canadian. Growing up, friends from my communities, families, I saw many of them go into financial distress because one parent passed away unexpectedly, and they did not have adequate insurance coverage in place.
I saw what it did to those families. This is an area where we can make a huge difference. There's also a significant upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer, and while we have a strong public health system in Canada, it will need to be complemented by some additional private spending. We're really well positioned to solution all of these macro trends. So this is our roadmap, our strategy on a page, to becoming the undisputed leading insurer in Canada. I call these the four Ds: deliver in core, digital customer leadership, distribution expansion, and differentiation through health. All will contribute to increasing core ROE. Of course, any other additional legacy actions, working with Marc and the in-force management team, provide further upside to this.
The right side of the slide shows incremental core ROE growth for each of the four Ds, and I'll drill into each of these separately. Delivering core is all about focusing on the brilliant basics. Vitality is available on all our core retail insurance products. Vitality plus customers buy 20% plus higher face amounts, have 50% lower lapse rates, are 55% more likely to cross-sell to other product lines, and have three times higher net promoter scores than our traditional offering. Our par fund returns are among the highest in the industry, driven by our investment expertise, including alternative assets. We launched in Q4 of last year, a new version of our par product and a payout annuity product, and we're seeing great traction on both of those. On the group insurance side, it's about maintaining our industry-leading metrics.
Last year, our persistency was over 97%. Our direct expenses are below peer averages, and so we'll drive continued increased short-term insurance profits. We'll continue to optimize the product suite and continue to leverage existing distribution. You heard from Karen and Jody about all the great things we're doing to become the digital customer leader. Digital is a second D for the Canada strategy, and it's about moving from very good to exceptional. Now, I'm really excited about this because these are win-win solutions, better experiences for customers and expense efficiency for the company. Take, for example, a group health insurance claim with out-of-pocket costs, like massage therapy. So this is not one of the claims that's instantly adjudicated. This is one where someone has to provide a submission.
In the past, it's taken us a few days to process and approve such a claim. By the end of the year, it'll be within a day, and we're targeting to get that one to instant also. We're the leader in underwriting using artificial intelligence. Currently, about 25% of our business is underwritten in this way. We're targeting to get to increase that proportionally 2-3 times by 2027. We're laser-focused on increasing all aspects of digital, the digital experience. It's a top priority across the segment. There are multiple elements to distribution expansion. There's significant underinsurance in the mass market. The mass market requires simple products and processes. Products have to be easy to buy, easy to sell, easy to service. This complements perfectly with our digital ambitions. The goal is to obtain a representative share of this market.
The natural share of the market for us is 20%, and our strategy is just about simply getting to this. It's very achievable. The MGA within Manulife Wealth, which Paul talked about yesterday, is a strategic asset for us. Taking insurance productivity to top of class will double sales. Further activating wealth advisors who don't currently sell insurance provides further upside. These opportunities are about execution. We're also looking to proactively engage specific target market segments with custom strategies. The Asian Canadian market, for example, is the fastest-growing market segment in Canada and the highest utilization of Vitality. It's a natural opportunity for expansion for us, given our Asian footprint. The high net worth market. We get feedback from our reinsurance partners that our underwriting is best in class in the high net worth space, and of course, we're leveraging our global capabilities here.
We get feedback from advisors that our tax and estate planning team is best in market. So again, a natural opportunity for distribution expansion. Differentiation through health is about moving from a standalone claims payer to an integrated health platform. We talk to Canadians all the time, and they're telling us they're having challenges accessing and navigating the healthcare system. We have the tools to help. Our North Star is improved health outcomes, the right care at the right time, in the right way. This is not just theoretical. We've built the platform and rolled it out. With Manulife employees, we did a pilot for Manulife employees in Canada, and we increased the utilization of the app from 40% to 70% within six months. We're already seeing how we can improve the health outcomes for millions of Canadians. Our strategic partnerships are showing great promise.
On our specialty drug program, we saw a 5% increase in prescription adherence and a 45% decrease in disability claims for members using our strategic partner, which is curated. Over on the block, we have CAD 6.5 billion of reserves and CAD 3 billion... CAD 6.5 billion of claims every year, and we hold CAD 3 billion in reserves against known, non-permanent disability. Moving the needle just 5% is a huge impact for us and our sponsors. Healthier members, lower claims, and continued excellent persistency. Now, unlike some of our peers, our platform is fully integrated with the claims paying model tool. Our strategic partners are world-class players and household names in Canada, not something that smaller players can duplicate. The platform is powered by League, a global health tech pl- company and a Canadian success story....
Aeroplan is our new health rewards partner. Telus Health for mental health, virtual care, and employee assistance programs plugs right in seamlessly with a single sign-on. Cleveland Clinic Canada is our medical director. This is just the beginning. We're going to continue to expand partnerships and enhance our platform. This will be a true differentiator. So I want you to leave with the same confidence that I have in the future of our Canadian business. We're already the market leader. We're number one in core earnings, and we're number one in sales across multiple product lines. We're committed to making decisions easier and lives better for millions of Canadians. We're excited to take that to the next level. We're ready to continue to drive growth for Manulife and become the undisputed leading insurer in Canada. Thank you very much, and I'll turn it back to you, Hung.
Thank you, Naveed. It's great to hear how we become the undisputed leader in Canada. Our next presenter will be Brooks Tingle, President and CEO of John Hancock, our U.S. business. Brooks will share with us our transformation journey and also how our unique product offering will continue to drive profit growth in that market. With that, please welcome Brooks.
Hey, thank you, Hung. Great to be with you. It's exciting to sort of wrap up the presentations over the past day and a half, because over the past day and a half, you've heard a lot about Manulife overall, and the great transformation journey we've undertaken. But the U.S. is a really interesting and exciting microcosm of that. There are three things that I hope you remember from my presentation this morning. One, we have dramatically transformed, oops, where am I? Looking back. I don't want to be looking back. Okay, there we go. We've dramatically transformed the profitability of our U.S. business. The legacy businesses, the in-force businesses, a lot of people have, I think, old tapes, maybe stereotypes about the U.S. insurance business.
To be able to drive improvement in ROE over the past few years from 8%-16% in the U.S. insurance business is something we're very, very proud of. The second is an equally powerful transformation in the profitability of the new business that we write. So dramatic improvement in the in-force, dramatic improvement in the in-force. The third thing I want to share with you and, and add some color to, is the unique foundation we now have to grow profitably in the future, and the heart of that foundation is our investment, our commitment to behavioral insurance, brought to life through something we call John Hancock Vitality. It's a very unique value proposition for us, highly differentiated, driving not just improved financial performance, but a unique right to win.
So before I get into the first of those, which is the transformation of our in-force legacy businesses, I did want to just show you a quick highlight of where we operate today from a go-to-market perspective. Over the past several years or decade plus, really, we winnowed our focus a bit from a go-to-market perspective, really to try to drive that ROE improvement. So where we offer product today, individual life insurance is really in some of the most attractive market segments in the space. We have diversified sales. People in the U.S. buy life insurance for primarily one of two reasons: protection, as the name implies, protection against unexpected death, lost income, protection against perhaps an estate tax liability, protection in that regard. The other reason people buy life insurance is accumulation. Also, as the name suggests, to accumulate wealth.
In the US, there aren't a ton of ways to accumulate assets on a tax-favored basis anymore. Of course, you have 401(k)s, IRAs. Beyond that, really sort of muni bonds and life insurance and annuities. Particularly at the higher end of the market, a lot of people in the US use life insurance as a means to accumulate wealth, and we're nicely diversified, as you can see here, between protection and accumulation. That's important because as tax laws change, come under threat, as economic conditions change, we can kind of pivot our product focus between, protection and accumulation to, to thrive. Within primarily permanent life insurance, we offer term insurance.
It's really sort of just a necessary thing to have on the platform to keep brokers' attention, but we really focus our energy on the, frankly, higher value permanent products, and within that, variable life, universal life, and index universal life. Strong shareholder value, really compelling customer value, with innovative sort of pass-through designs that have a very attractive risk profile associated with them. A few highlights here as I start to talk about the transformation over the past few years of our in-force and legacy businesses. You can see the large quantum of remittances we've been able to deliver to Manulife. Perhaps the most striking number for me on this slide is the new business value transformation. The life insurance business that our brokerage operation was selling in 2017 actually destroyed new business value.
You can see a -36 here. Just over a few years, we've been able to transform that to where those products have nice margins on them. You'll see another chart on that in a moment, and we're creating a lot of value with every sale that we make. So we're now confident actually growing this business, so quite a dramatic transformation there. Solid contributions on the core earnings growth. You may look at sales and say, "Geez, that's not really scorching growth there, Brooks." Fair enough, but I can tell you our priority over the past few years has been to improve the left side of this chart, not the right. The fact that we've been able to grow while strengthening margins the way that we have to yield this new business value improvement is quite significant.
U.S. market, individual life insurance market, I'm sure you know, is not growing fast. We've actually outgrown the market five out of the last six years, and we think we're in a position now to outgrow the market nicely in the coming years. So I talked about the improvement in return on equity, something we're extremely proud of, quite dramatic, quite important to the overall Manulife franchise. Really pretty simple story as to how this was achieved. Simple, though not easy, but very focused and determined management actions. First and foremost, divesting of lower margin businesses, of lower ROE businesses. My team, I myself, enjoy just a wonderful relationship with Marc and his team, partner extremely closely in an ongoing series of transactions that you're all familiar with, to, you know, reduce the quantum of these lower margin businesses in our overall portfolio.
Big driver of this improvement. The second is really sort of organic activity as it relates to the in-force block, and that is most notably very, very disciplined expense management. And by disciplined expense management, I don't mean just, oh, let's keep it to inflation or less. Significant reductions in expenses in the U.S., which I'll highlight in a moment. And then lastly, in terms of the material drivers of this ROE improvement, is that significant improvement in the profitability of the new business that we're writing each year. So altogether, extremely proud of this improvement. I mentioned before the collaboration between my team and Naveed's team as well with, with Marc's team, and just extremely proud of this track record. I mean, you can't get much more sort of reliable and predictable than this nice series of transactions. I know it was discussed yesterday.
I know you all know that we're not done, Marc's not done, but we've proven that not only can these opportunities be identified, but they can be executed really, really well and successfully. I mentioned cost management. Don't have the time to get into this in a huge amount of detail, but again, this isn't just about sort of holding the line on expenses. It was about transforming the expense base in the U.S., taking out large swaths of expense. You can see that materialize in some important metrics. I didn't have the space or the time to share a lot of them, but we have a lot of them that show quite favorable unit costs, whether it's operations, technology, or other spaces, relative to the market, relative to our competitors.
Most important thing I want to note about this, whenever you see an organization taking out literally $hundreds of millions of expense over a period of relatively few years, you might wonder, have we compromised the franchise somehow? Are we able to service our customers properly, properly? And I'm extremely proud to share that because of the way that we've done this, investments in digital, moving some of the technology things to the cloud, consolidating technology, administrative systems, and things like that, we've not only taken out $200 million of expense, we've improved the quality of the service we're able to deliver to our customers. Our NPS scores have literally never been higher after taking out this type of expense, so we're very proud of that. Again, new business transformation. You can see the evolution here of our new business value margins.
Our LROCs, lifetime return on capital, dramatic improvement over just a few years, easily double the average in the U.S. And then again, notable improvement in the capital payback year. So it took a little bit of time to get here, but we are now in a position where we're happy to sell all the life insurance we can at these types of margins. So it's a great position to be in, and again, we have a great platform for that, which is John Hancock Vitality. So you've probably heard of Vitality, most of you. Vitality has partnered with other companies in different parts of the world. Let me tell you, at the risk of sounding immodest, no one is bringing Vitality to life the way we are, both in the U.S., under John Hancock and Naveed now in Canada. We are investing heavily.
We take what Vitality offers for sure, but we've invested a ton around that, ton of creativity, partnerships, energy, you know, passion around this concept of Vitality, and it's a really simple concept. You know, in the grand scheme of everyone's life here, who should care about you living a long, healthy life beyond your friends and family, more than your life insurance company, right? It strikes us as being profoundly odd that for hundreds of years, this industry underwrote the daylights out of people, issued them policies, and sat back and said, "I sure hope they live a long, healthy life. That'd be great." I mean, you all know how we make money, right? You guys are kind enough to pay us premiums.
Scott and Paul and others invest them for us, and the longer we get to collect those premiums, invest dollars, the more money we make. So why would we just sit back and hope our customers live a longer, healthier life? Let's try to affect that outcome. And that's exactly what, like, exactly what we're trying to do here. Shift from passive claims payer, sit back and wait to pay the claims, to active risk manager. Let's engage and try to bend that mortality curve. We do that through a really nifty app, education, and importantly, incentives and rewards, all correlated to things that correlate with a longer, healthier, better life. Ton of science behind here. You see the types of things that we give people points for. It's crudely analogous to an airline frequent flyer program.
An airline, the more miles you fly, your status improves, and you get more perks, right? Or you get treated less poorly. Sorry, airline fans, but here you get points. They accumulate to a status, bronze, silver, gold, or platinum, and that correlates with the value you get back, because you're creating value for us. You know, I won't get into all the science behind this, but here's a simple reality: most people in America do not conform with the recommendations for when you're supposed to go for a colonoscopy, at what age, a mammogram, male, female, all these different things. Not great compliance with that. We give people points for that, and we see our clients much more often going for those preventative screenings. Just one simple, our customers take twice as many steps on average as the average American.
But anyways, points for doing these things that correlate with longevity. Status, you then you get the rewards of it. Premium savings, I want to note, by the way, that those premium savings, the discounts that our customers can enjoy, are fully backed by our reinsurers. And then a whole bunch of other cool rewards that oddly, customers are more excited about. We have customers that literally are like billionaires with a B. We have this thing called a Vitality Wheel. Every tenth workout you get, you get to spin this wheel, and I got a text from this, literally a billionaire recently saying, "I got $5 from Amazon on the Vitality Wheel." It's, I mean, it's almost illogical, right? But people are motivated by this stuff. But again, the concept, it we, we, it's fun, it's engaging. Karen mentioned a really important stat.
Our customers are now engaging with us 20-30 times a month through this platform. So it sounds fun and cool, all that, but very, very important things are happening behind the scenes about longevity and long-term experience, mortality results that we expect here. A few stats I want to share on this. In the U.S., I joked today that, well, 9 out of 10 consumers, this isn't Brooks asking his friends and family, "Would you prefer Vitality to other life insurance?" Independent third-party research, 9 out of 10 consumers say they would prefer life insurance with Vitality to life insurance without it. I joke all the time, in America today, you cannot get 9 out of 10 Americans to agree that the Earth is round, but 9 out of 10 Americans prefer Vitality.
Seven out of ten U.S. consumers say the presence of Vitality would make them more likely to buy life insurance. Naveed shared some of the stats. They buy higher face amounts. The NPS among our Vitality customers, we have 64 here, to be honest with you, it's actually trending up into ranges that life insurance companies don't see. So a really sort of virtuous cycle, where if we can encourage our customers to do things that promote longevity, creates value for us, we plow part of that value back. On an improved mortality side, Mr. Finch, wherever he is, would lunge up here and drag me off the stage if I started to share actual mortality results, because they're not yet fully mature. We need a more... Not something we're sitting back and cheering for.
We need a certain number of deaths among our Vitality customers to be able to share with you, quote, unquote, you know, "credible," actuarially credible mortality data. But I can tell you, as deaths have increased slowly, at every step of the way, we're seeing meaningful differences in mortality between Vitality customers and non, and within Vitality by status. So we're very excited about the future here. Okay, so looking back, incredibly proud of the improvement in the ROE for the U.S. business. Excited about the transformation of the new business profitability, and really, really excited to take this platform that we've built anchored around behavioral insurance into the future. So let's talk about the future. We certainly are going to continue. We don't consider the job done with respect to in-force and legacy businesses. That work is continuing, trust me. Marc and others are very busy.
It's continuing, and we're going to continue to support that, the execution of those, those transactions. And we will maintain a very persistent focus, not just on inorganic activity related to the in-force blocks, but organic activity. And I want to spend a minute, in a moment, sharing with you some of the things we're doing on the organic side to further improve there. Karen and Jody did a great job talking about digital. Digital is hugely important to us in the U.S., and we have an advantage that no competitor can touch in terms of driving digital engagement in the U.S. Most people, sorry to disappoint you, aren't really super excited to digitally engage or engage in any way with their life insurance company, so driving digital adoption can be pretty tricky.
We have customers that want to engage with us digitally because they're getting these rewards, these benefits and things. So we have these positive interactions, all digital, 20-30 a month, so it's very easy for us to slide into that, "Hey, do your customer service this way. Perhaps buy your next amount of insurance the same way." So a huge advantage there. And again, we're confident that we can outpace the growth in our insurance business of the industry in the coming years based on the uniqueness of Vitality. So think about ROE. We talked a bit about the journey from 8%-16%. We see getting to 17% by 2027.
I do want to point out that notably, this projection and sort of crude guide path as to how we're going to get there, does not include potential additional inorganic transactions. That's sort of the dotted line on the far right. So a lot of ROE improvement so far, but through continuing actions, digital leadership and growth of profitable sales, we believe we can improve that ROE even further between now and 2027. I mentioned this focus on not just inorganic activity to drive improved results on our legacy businesses, but organic activity. We talked about expense reduction, but particularly with our LTC business, there is a tremendous opportunity to shape outcomes there. Investments, partnering with Jody and Karen on investments in AI and other things to eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse in our long-term care claims.
One I'm most excited about probably is trying to bend the morbidity curve, influence outcomes for long-term care claims. We have shown over the past 10 years that we can bend the mortality curve. We can shape mortality outcomes on the life insurance side through Vitality. Well, let me tell you, in the U.S., probably not anywhere in the world, no one is looking forward to the day that they get to go into an assisted living facility. No one looks forward to the day that they require assisted living services. And you know what? We kind of hope they don't need them either, right? Because we got a bunch of risk there. So can't we, shouldn't we, and we will, engage our existing long-term care customers to help shape those outcomes? So if you're in your 50s, we're going to incentivize you to exercise and eat well.
Sixties, exercise, eat well, maybe add some medication adherence. Seventies, those things, maybe some brain plasticity things. Companies, we partner very closely through Vitality with the Apple, Google, and Amazon and others of the world. People are working on wearables, not just that will say, so and so has fallen, but alerting a loved one that so and so is within 30-60 days of taking a fall, which for our LTC business, knowing before the fall happens is really important. And then you're in your eighties, and we're already doing some of this today, we're going to send someone to your house to make sure your carpet's secure, you've got a railing, all these things. So we are confident we can actually shape those outcomes with respect to long-term care, a huge win for the customer, a huge win for us.
Digital, I've already touched on it. Just again, we've got a meaningful advantage here through the Vitality program. People actually want to interact with us digitally, so we're gonna build on that to be a leader. And then just some, some overall tailwinds we see for the business as it relates to growth. Huge. You've heard every market pretty much talks about this unmet need. I will tell you, I, I was always sort of skeptical about this unmet need, the protection gap, until I started spending a lot of time with the companies that we work with through Vitality. Again, the Apples, Googles, Amazons.
Every time I'm meeting with one of those execs, I ask, "Do you have individual life insurance?" I think in a meeting with, I probably had meetings with 200 execs of those companies, and there have been 3 that have said they have individual life insurance. 3. Trust me, these people have a lot of money. And I'll never forget asking this one executive at Amazon, like, "Why don't you, because I want more life insurance. I love this Vitality thing, so why don't you have more?" "So I tried to sign up for more, but they wanted to send a nurse to my house and weigh me and, like, take my blood.
I'm not gonna do that." There's this whole generation of digital-savvy people that are earning real money now, that we have to evolve the buying process using AI and things like that, electronic health records, and that's where you get a lot of those people to start buying our products. The huge wealth transfer that's occurring globally, it's very pronounced in the U.S. Again, we have a distinct advantage there. We know all of our customers who have large policies, and we've got a lot of customers with very large policies. We know who, typically adult children, but we know who stands to get the death benefit proceeds. We know who stands to inherit that money.
Why wouldn't we now offer Vitality to those adult children of these wealthy people who have policies with us, so when they pass and the money goes down, the customers are already in Vitality, far more likely to stay with John Hancock for their plan, because they're now gonna have their own planning needs, stay with John Hancock. So we're very well positioned there. And then just a broad headwind, I'm sorry, tailwind for the U.S. insurance market is some tax reform activity occurring over the next 18 months. State taxes are scheduled to sunset. Boring stuff, but, we're in a great position there. We are a top two player in the survivorship market, which will benefit enormously from this, estate tax reform. So very well-positioned, innovative capabilities, really strong distribution relationships.
I just spent the weekend with 200 or 300 of the top independent distributors in the U.S. Some interesting things happening there, by the way, if interested, during the Q&A. We're really uniquely well positioned to grow profitably going forward. And I'll leave you with one of the things that I think positions us best for the future and that I'm most excited about, a really unique ecosystem of partners. Partners that help us in a range of ways, but particularly as it relates to helping people live longer, healthier, better lives, and I'll just highlight two quickly. Who here has heard of a company called Grail? A test called Galleri? Anybody actually do the test yet? A couple of you, okay. So Grail has this test, it's called a multi-cancer early detection test.
Through a simple blood draw, they can detect the presence of over 50 types of cancer in your body. This isn't a, "Gee, Brooks, you're more likely to get some sort of cancer down the road." This is like, "You do or do not have cancer in your body today." We were the first life insurance company to begin offering that to our customers almost 2 years ago, and we have now had many customers find out that they have early-stage cancer as a result of our offering. Many people have said, "Geez, if I hadn't bought a policy from John Hancock, if I hadn't signed up for Vitality, if I hadn't done that test, I wouldn't know I have cancer." Including people, one guy with a really large policy, by the way, found out that he had stage 2 pancreatic cancer by virtue of our offering.
Anybody ever hear of somebody getting diagnosed with stage 2 pancreatic cancer? It's unfortunately almost always 3 or 4, and the prognosis is exceptionally poor. This client of ours, 45 straight days, chemo, radiation, surgery, just ran a half marathon. So it sounds great from sort of a warm and fuzzy feeling, and I, and I mean that in a serious way, and my mom died from a type of cancer way too young, that should have been detected way too early. Early detection is essential. So it's great from a human perspective, but from a business perspective, that policyholder with a $20 million policy that got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at stage 2, that probably would've been a death claim within what, 2 years? Now, I don't know, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years?
So great for the customer, great for business. So Grail has been an important partnership. We just launched. Who's heard of Prenuvo, a company called Prenuvo? Full body imaging, MRI scan, head to ankles. I don't know why not toes, but ankles. And literally head to toe MRI, they can identify 70 factors that tie to mortality from the scan. I did it myself. It's amazing. We just were the first life insurance company to partner with them in the U.S. All of our customers will get a $500 discount on the screening. What our brokers love the most is that our customers move to the front of the line. This is just taking off in popularity with wealthy people in the U.S., in particular, oftentimes a 10- or 12-week wait time at their facilities.
Brokers just love that our customers get to cut the line and go to the front. Huge differentiator for us. So incredibly excited about these things. I wanna leave you with a, with a, well, again, I mentioned already, just to summarize, great improvement in ROE, great improvement in new business in this behavioral insurance platform through Vitality. And I wanna leave you with a video that I think sums up what we're doing in a really powerful way, not just for people, not just for society, but for our shareholders. 'Cause as you hear Kelly King's story... Again, I've met Kelly many times. I, I can't tell you how powerful it is to meet somebody who tells you that you saved their life. Surely, it wasn't me, it was all the great people on the team.
But he only knows he has cancer because he was a John Hancock customer, and he participated in John Hancock Vitality. But again, ask you to think about from a shareholder perspective-
... 36%-38% of our customers are going to get cancer. Just a fact. Would we, as a life insurance company, rather they find out early, with eight times the successful treatment outcomes, or later with much poorer outcomes? Of course, earlier. So as you think about the story, that's a great testament to what we're trying to do and why our business, why we're so excited about our business going forward. So thank you, and please enjoy the video.
Yeah, I think the last time she cut my hair, I was probably—
You were in college, probably.
No, I—
High school?
No. As soon as I had a voice, I stopped you from cutting my hair. This isn't a story about cancer. It's a story about vitality. Let me tell you how I got here. 15 years ago, I bought a term life insurance policy from John Hancock. As a husband and father, it was a no-brainer for me to buy life insurance. I was working on my vision for the future I wanted to have, and kids and grandkids, and being active was just central. When I decided to be more engaged with vitality, I learned about the Galleri test and thought, "Well, why not take it?" The results of the first screening test showed high signals for cancer. I called my primary care physician.
He said, "I've never heard of this test before," but he did a follow-up. When he saw the results of my PSA and my lung scan, he told me to go home. "You're fine. You don't have cancer. Go live your life." Then Grail reached out to do a retest. Went down to Florida to spend Thanksgiving with my grandkids. I got the call, and she explained that, "We found high signals for breast cancer." I went back to my doctor. He's rolling his eyes, but I, I convinced him to do the test. They came out and said, "Your mammogram is clear," and suggested we don't even do the ultrasound, and that I just go home. I guess I just really wanted to get to the bottom of it. But what if this Galleri test is right? If it's right, I wanna know.
And so I said, "That, that's really not an option. We're gonna do the ultrasound." At the end of that ultrasound, he's pointing to a swollen lymph node in my armpit and says, "We need to biopsy that." I got the phone call from the surgeon, and he said, "We have the results of your biopsy, and you have cancer. We're gonna do chemotherapy, and we're gonna do radiation." Okay, this is real. All kinds of things are going through my mind. Life is now completely different than it ever has been. I think about just how miraculous it is that I know I have cancer. John Hancock had to make the decision to learn about this test and then put it in their program.
Had they not done it, I would not know I have cancer today, no doubt, and I'd have found out later, and maybe at a point when it's too late. We caught this at such an early stage that my chances of winning are extremely high. I get excited about the things I wanna do with my life. You get excited about being around those people that love you. Being around long enough to see those grandkids grow up, graduations, football games, weddings. The whole idea of Vitality has such a different meaning to me today. It is about changing your future. I wanna spread that message. Thanks for letting me share the story today. I'm gonna kick cancer's butt, and hopefully, I'll get some Vitality points for that.
Thank you, Brooks. I can ... I'm sure you can hear the passion and excitement we have of U.S. business. Now, I would like to bring back the panelists, who at the last few sessions, to join Roy on stage for the last Q&A panel of our event in Hong Kong. Before we get them to join us, I would like to remind you to please introduce yourself and your firm before you ask a question, and we have people bringing the microphone to you. Panelists? We open for question.
Gabriel Dechaine, National Bank. One question for Naveed. I noticed that, unless I missed it, the ROE, we saw the progress from 17 to 23 on ROE, but no objective. Hopefully, I didn't miss that. But, do you have a target for 2027? And then the-- yeah, I'll stop there, actually.
Yeah, the target, there was a slide on that.
Oh.
The target is from 14%-16%.
Six, okay.
Yeah, yeah, by 2027.
All right. Okay. I guess I did miss that. The system that we saw there, the Gen AI thing, I'm just curious, how much does something like that cost?
I can answer in weeks. The original system took us 12 weeks to develop, and it was probably a team of 10 that were involved in that. The reason we were able to do it that efficiently is because we made some significant investments in our data AI platforms. We moved everything to the cloud. We moved all of our data lakes. We moved all of our AI models, and so we used that kind of as the starting point for delivering what you saw.
Just to add to that, Gabriel, it's a great question, and we think that this is a competitive advantage for us and a disadvantage for the companies that haven't invested in the infrastructure. So the billion dollars that I talk about, having invested over the last five years, putting the data architecture, the data infrastructure that we've put in place to support advanced analytics and AI, now allows us to accelerate the use of Gen AI. And quite frankly, without that, it would have taken us, you know, possibly not just months, but years, to be able to really at scale deploy some of the use cases that Jody just talked about.
Is that we saw the examples of sending emails out and changing the tone? Is it a like a mass market type product capability or sales capability rather as opposed to something more high touch?
Let me start, Jody-
Sure.
You know, we, we don't think it's limited to one segment. So we think the tool and the capability is to scale across all different customer segments, but also channels. Obviously, the tone will change, and the interaction that will exist between, for example, an agent and ultimately what gets sent out is, is really still critical. You can't just have this machine just send stuff out. You need a human in there. But if this, this process can greatly optimize the efficiency and then convert into a much more significant, you know, sales ratio, that's, that's quite tremendous.
Yeah, I might add, one of the advantages is the, as we refer to the intelligent customer data platform, and that's where we've got, a holistic 360 view of the customer. So we know everything about the customer, and that is where, the Gen AI model is drawing the data from in order to come to those conclusions. So if it's a mass market client, we will know by their holdings, we will know by, a whole bunch of different parameters. And if it's a high net worth customer, we will know that as well, and then we can, you know, manage the tone and the approach correspondingly. So it is highly adaptive.
All right, thanks.
Next question, table 8.
Mendonca, TD Securities. So you sell insurance, which is a pretty mature product. It's an old product in two economies that are very mature economies. But you're talking about 16% and 17% ROEs. So that, that just seems odd to me. That's not what I grew up with. So what gives? Like, how, how do, how do you generate ROEs of that magnitude, mature products and mature economies? And I appreciate that IFRS 17 probably has something to do with this. Maybe it's 200-300 basis points. But walk me through that type of an ROE, 'cause, you know, Finance 101, Econ 101 wouldn't, wouldn't get you there.
Yeah, let me start. Naveed, Brooks, chime in. I think the first thing is that, you know, we've been much more selective with the products that we're offering. You've seen throughout all the presentations the focus on LROCs, lifetime return on capital. So where traditionally you look at the market average returns on new business, and they're historically quite low, we're saying we're not going to be all things to everyone. We're going to focus on those products that we can actually generate a return that's acceptable to our shareholders. So that's certainly part of the reason why we can actually generate improvements in ROE. You're right, IFRS 17 is another factor. But the third big factor is the benefits of scale and now digitization.
We've got this incredible transformative technology through GenAI, but even before that, AI and machine learning, which is completely changing the game. The efficiency ratio that we talked about earlier, 55%, down to 45%. The scale benefits that we're getting through our procurement and operational teams, but then the use of technology to take cost out is, in my mind, what's driving a significant improvement in our profitability and why our LROCs are now so much higher, but why our returns are so much higher than what historically has been the case. Our efficiency ratios are among the best in the industry, and that is significant value. It's not a theoretical presentation that Colin provided earlier, but it's real hard cold dollars. We. You remember back in 2017, 2018, we said we wanted to improve our efficiency.
We also said we wanted to take $1 billion worth of cost out. We achieved that $1 billion two years ahead of schedule. Now, as we look to the next chapter, you know, I'm incredibly excited about GenAI, and I think it's gonna drive a next level of efficiency and, and improvements. But Naveed, Brooks, please chime in.
... Let me start. I, yeah, exactly what you said, Roy. So we, our in-force block, our current ROE is 14% in Canada, and the lifetime return on capital of the new business we're writing is over 20%. So, you know, as that comes in over time, and it's some of the things you talked about. It's about scale. We have the scale already, and some of the investments we're making are gonna take it to the next level. We're already industry leading. We're gonna get to another level. So that's a big part of it. It's about really capitalizing the opportunities. So I mentioned that our group health, group benefit health platform, we have 5 million group benefit members, right?
Historically, they've just been going to the application or website and submitting claims. So it's a simple claims paying model. It's about really activating those and offering them experiences that are win-win and taking it to the next level.
Yeah, and I totally respect and appreciate the question. I've, you know, grown up in this business, and I'm used to thinking of, you know, U.S. insurance as a cost of capital plus a little bit, right? And for 50 years, it's been that, really, you look at the U.S. market. But if you think about what the dynamics have been that have been keeping that sort of pressure on it, it's these big legacy blocks with a mix of sort of marginally profitable businesses and, frankly, new sales that aren't optimally profitable. We've addressed both parts of that. We've said, "Let's shed some of the lower ROE components of our in-force," I would argue as aggressively, if not more than anybody in the U.S. And then you saw the dramatic turnaround in the profitability of the new business we're writing.
So every piece of new business we write now pulls that number up, not dampens it down. We've been selective, as Roy said, and where we play, I think, you know, you see a lot of carriers that are tempted to try to be all things to all people. Trust me, I could be a top 2 or 3 player in the term insurance market if I wanted to be, but I don't because that would compromise the very metrics we're talking about. We're okay being number 20 there. And then all the reasons that Roy and Naveed have described around expense efficiency, and I think there's just more to come, frankly, on the expense efficiency.
I might just add that, you know, the CAD 185 million and the CAD 500 million and the CAD 1.5 billion overall, the way to think about that is actually 50% of that is hard cost savings that will flow through earnings as they're realized and will actually impact efficiency ratios, and those are baked into the segment plans.
Thanks.
Next question. Down Table 16.
Hi, Brendan Sammut, RBC. I'm curious, some insurance companies have talked about the impact of GLP-1 drugs. Any early thoughts on that and what it could mean for the business over time? Thank you.
Sorry, go for it. Yeah, I, I, personal view here, personal and professional, I guess. I think they're game changers. We... Again, one of the real strategic advantages we have is the company we keep. I have nothing against the rest of the, like, the US life industry or global, but I spend very little time with CEOs of other life insurance companies. I spend most of my time with people at MIT and Apple and all these places, trying to understand what's in their heads. And every smart person that I know says, "Game changer on GLP-1s," and I think a game changer for our industry. I mean, just think about the proportion of people in really every market we're in, that experience matters relating to obesity, the cost and the toll, the life expectancy implications of that.
So, I think we're on the precipice of some major macro tailwinds, not just GLP-1, some of the technology I touched on, and any one of them in and of itself, but you start stacking these things on top of each other, you do the Galleri test from Grail, you do the Prenuvo scan. If you need it, you're on a GLP-1. You're stacking things in your favor, and I think we've got a major tailwind on mortality. And I can tell you there's not a company around that can capitalize on it better. Right now, we're, you know, we, we offer the Galleri test, we offer Prenuvo. We're thinking about, you know, what do we do for our clients that maybe don't have access to GLP-1s? Shouldn't we want them to have that access? How do we perhaps incentivize that?
A brilliant question, I think a huge game changer.
Brendan, I think the pharmaceutical advancements that we've seen over the last five years and we're expecting to see over the next decade is another tailwind. I can't put my finger on how big that is and what the potential is. You've talked to one area, but the research that we're seeing in Alzheimer's, dementia, this is quite transformative, for the general well-being of the population, but for our business and our industry. So we are quite excited about that and how it's gonna actually help us. Brooks talks very passionately about trying to help our customers live longer, and we think that too much of the healthcare system is reactive. You're dealing with a symptom, and then you're trying to correct that symptom.
The true game is to be fought in the preventative care space, and I think we've just seen so much more being done there. We want to be the leader on that front. We, as I said in the very beginning of this program, want to move from being a company that's focused, as our industry is, on deaths and claims, to being one that's focused on really helping our customers live longer and improving their wellness.
Question here, Table 11.
Yeah. Tom MacKinnon, BMO Capital. Question for Naveed. The mass market is underserved, and it's hard to get brokers to go for it because, you know, the commission dollars are so much higher if they're going after high net worth. So, what's the why would they chase that marketplace? So when you said that you wanted to double your share from 10 to 20 over four years in the mass market, that seems to be a tall order, and I don't know if you can do it just by telling your distribution to go after them. They'll, they go where the money is. So, like, what's your strategy there? Because it is an underserved market where there's potential for some good margin expansion.
... Yeah, so Tom, I agree, it's underserved. The opportunity is staring us in the face. And again, the 10%-20% is on a relative basis, right? In terms of market share. So the—you're right that, you know, some distributors have shied away from the market because they're smaller tickets, and there's a lot of work involved in, you know, making the sale. And so what's important here is to make it a seamless process, right? Really easy. Really easy to buy, really, really easy to sell, really easy to service. And so as we're building out our digital capabilities, those capabilities can be repurposed within this market. So it's just an—this is a natural connection to our digital customer ambitions.
It would seem that you have a natural way to get into that through the affinity market.
Yeah.
Can you take advantage of that more than you're currently doing?
Yeah. So we have a multi-channel distribution strategy for our mass market. There are a number of brokers in the market and MGAs that focus on the mass market. We'll sort of activate those. We've built an in-house wholesaling team to interact with those. And I agree with that affinity markets is sort of this captive opportunity for us. We have access to all the different professional associations and university alumni, and offering simple solutions, digitally enabled, is a big opportunity and a big focus.
Thank you. Any questions from the audience? Sounds like it's a wrap for us. I would like to thank our panelists for joining us here, and but, Roy, please stay behind. I'd like to have you offer some final closing remarks for us.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay. Can you hear me okay? I've cut my mics off. How are we all doing? How's the jet lag? We're still in there? We're hanging in there? I hope so. And I hope you've enjoyed the last couple of days. I wanted to sort of close this part of our Investor Day sessions with a huge thank you. The first thank you is to all of you for investing the time to come and be with us for a few days. I know it's a huge commitment to travel, and for many of you, across the world, and to actually invest the time to be here.
I hope you've also found it very valuable and informative, but also insightful in terms of a, the journey that we've been on as a company, but also where we're going as to our future direction. I want to thank you all also for the support that you offer and give us. As shareholders, you know, you've placed a lot of trust in us, and we don't take that for granted. It's absolutely critical for us that we, you know, deliver to the requirements of our shareholders, and it's not lost on us. And obviously, for the analysts in the room, we appreciate the engagement. I want to also just thank you for the engagement throughout the course of the last couple of days. The questions, the engagement from the crowd has been energizing for the team.
As you can imagine, an incredible amount of work goes into preparing for these events, but it's really fulfilling when we can get a real sense from the team that is here, that it's valuable and that you're finding the content useful, so I want to thank you for that. I want to wrap the session really where I started, and that is to leave you with a couple of key messages. The first message is that we are Manulife, a dramatically different company today to the one that we were in 2017. We don't say this lightly. This journey of transformation that we've been on is something we're incredibly passionate about, and it's something that's really driven incredible energy and excitement from every one of the ELT that are here and also that are in our head office.
And we are proud of what we've achieved. We've taken a company that was high risk, low ROE, and we've converted into a company that is lower risk and higher ROE, and that's certainly something that has taken an incredible amount of effort, but it's also been something that the team's been passionate about. The second message I wanted to leave you with is that we do have, you know, an incredibly high quality team and culture, and that has allowed us to deliver the results and the execution that you've been able to demonstrate, or we've been able to demonstrate and you've been able to see.
I'm hoping again, that you've had an opportunity to connect, not just with the leadership team, but the next level down, and you'll get a sense of not only the quality of these individuals, but the focus that they have on executing and delivering value. So that's really critical for us. We believe that we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the mega trends that are shaping the global economy. That's not something that we say lightly. We think the next decade is transformative in terms of the global economy, and I can't think of a better footprint to have than the one that we have to take the most use of or to take advantage of those mega trends.
The footprint that we have, I would not trade with any one of my peers, and that is what excites me about the journey that we have. And we, we do talk about raising the bar, not just in terms of our fin- not just in terms of our financial targets, but in terms of how we will show up and how we will operate. And again, I, I'm hoping that you get a real sense of the kind of transformation that's underpinning our business and how we actually operate culturally, but also in terms of how we're showing up for our customers. So I, I am incredibly excited.
We say that the best is still ahead of us, and I'm hoping that you get a sense of that energy, excitement, and passion that's there, but also have confidence that we have deep and very clear plans on how we're going to actually execute against that agenda. So thank you again for being with us. For those of you who are coming on to Jakarta with us, we'll, we won't say goodbye, but for the rest of you, thank you and safe travels back, and all the best. Cheers!