Where people decisions shape an insurer's conduct

In Chinese life insurance the agency is the largest workforce that most HR leaders do not formally manage. Agents hold agency contracts, are paid by commission and are registered as practitioners, so their selection, preparation and conduct sit between HR, the distribution channel and compliance. At Songbai I share responsibility for agent standards with the head of our individual agency channel. I work on who is admitted, how they are prepared, what they are told about income before they sign and how agency managers are developed. I measure the agency by intake: how many agents from each cohort are still selling at thirteen and twenty-five months, what they earn, what share of their early business is written on their own families and how the policies they sell persist. I do not own commission design or the channel's sales plan, and I am careful not to suggest that I do. My contribution is to make sure the people side of the channel is planned on honest numbers.

An insurer depends on people whose job is to check other people's work: return-visit callers, underwriters, claims reviewers, quality inspectors, compliance officers and internal auditors. I design how they are assessed so that finding a problem is never what damages a career. At Songbai that meant removing forced ranking and bottom elimination for 4,700 staff in these roles, measuring accuracy through sampling by a team outside the reporting line rather than through completion rates, and calibrating grades across teams without a quota. I agree the measures with the chief risk officer and the head of internal audit, because they know which behaviours have produced findings. I also watch for the opposite failure. Without a curve, grades drift upwards until they mean nothing, so every manager receives the grade distribution for their own and comparable teams each quarter, and large differences are explained at calibration rather than ignored.

Every listed life insurer in China needed more actuaries at once when the strengthened solvency rules took effect in 2022 and new insurance contract accounting followed in 2023, while the same companies were building data teams. I plan these specialist workforces years ahead rather than buying them in a hurry. At Songbai that has meant paid study leave and exam support for actuarial students, rotation every eighteen months across pricing, valuation, asset-liability management and experience analysis, a pay step on qualification set against the market, and a data track that lets analysts move between actuarial and data science work without leaving the company. The chief actuary owns the technical judgement about who is ready for signing responsibilities. My part is the pipeline, the pay architecture and the retention record, which I report to the remuneration committee each year alongside the cost of the external support we still buy.

Songbai's 27 provincial branches range from large coastal operations to western branches with a few hundred staff and long distances between offices. I am responsible for how branch leaders are chosen, developed, moved and replaced. Since 2023 a general manager may run one province for no more than six years, deputies gain experience in a second province before promotion, and every new appointment passes the regulator's review of the appointee's qualifications before the person takes office. Rotation affects families, so our package covers housing, journeys home, help with school places and support for a spouse's job search, and moves now follow the school year. I also look after the regional workforce beneath branch leadership: where service centres are located, how local hiring works and how a head-office decision lands in a city where Songbai is one of the larger employers.

I have prepared papers for board remuneration committees since 2016, first at the joint venture and since 2020 at Songbai, where I also support the nomination committee. The work covers senior management pay, the annual assessment of executives, deferral and recovery arrangements, branch leadership appointments and succession. Supervisory guidance for financial institutions in China expects part of the pay of senior staff and key risk roles to be deferred and recoverable after misconduct or losses, and I treat that expectation as a design requirement rather than a disclosure exercise. I write for directors who must decide: the recommendation, the alternatives and the strongest objection on the first page, with the evidence attached. I support the committee's own judgement rather than trying to replace it. When management's paper and an independent director's view differ, I want the minutes to show both positions and the reasons the committee gave.