NAB announced the sale of 80 per cent of its life insurance business to big Japanese life insurer Nippon Life for $2.4 billion yesterday.
The announcement was accompanied by the news that NAB will invest $300 million into its wealth business over four years, along with a $6.34 billion full-year profit for the NAB Group.
Speaking to InvestorDaily, NAB executive general manager for wealth advice Greg Miller said the $300 million injection will help fund the “digitisation” and “simplification” of the business.
The funds will also go towards improving adviser efficiency and NAB/MLC’s platforms, Mr Miller said.
“We will be focusing on all parts of the value chain for customers and advisers, and certainly some of it will be spent around platforms,” he said.
“A lot of that will be directed at how we make it digitised, how we make it simpler, how do we continually improve access for customers, [and] efficiency of advisers.
“[The investment will be] across the spectrum, both on our platforms in terms of where customers’ administration and investments will be held, as well as the way advisers operate in delivering advice to their customers,” Mr Miller said.
The $300 million investment is a “discrete” amount of funding that is separate from NAB’s recently announced $50 million innovation fund NAB Ventures, he said.
“Part of setting up an innovation fund is to use [the ideas] across your business. So one of the terrific things of having this innovation approach in NAB is that we can learn things around our customers and … take these learnings and apply them in different places,” Mr Miller said.
“So they’re discrete, but the learnings can be linked.”
As part of the agreement with Nippon Life, NAB will be spending the first half of 2016 separating its life business from MLC and extracting its superannuation business as a standalone entity.
“There is certainly a large volume of work to get that operating and we’ll be focusing on that and we have worked out how to operate our business so we can do those things at the same time,” Mr Miller said.
“And we’re planning on the dollars that we spend in making sure that we set up the partnership in the right way and then investing the $300 million in that future growth.”
