Strategy/Capital

Scale and Diversification

To prepare for uncertainty and the “new normal,” characterized by increasingly severe natural disasters and the spread of COVID-19, the Company will accelerate initiatives on Scale and Diversification, which is one of the core strategies of the Mid-Term Management Plan and build a resilient portfolio.

On Scale and Diversification, we will focus on the three insurance businesses (Domestic P&C Insurance, Overseas Insurance and Reinsurance, and Domestic Life Insurance) where solid business foundations have been established. In the Domestic P&C Insurance Business, we will improve profitability further as well as strengthen the ability to generate cash flow by completing the earnings structure reform. We will grow the Overseas Insurance and Reinsurance Business through disciplined M&As and high profit growth driven by organic growth, pricing improvement, etc. We will increase revenue from the Domestic Life Insurance Business by leveraging Insurhealth® to reach new customer segments. In FY2021, the first year of the Mid-Term Management Plan, the three insurance businesses grew steadily toward strengthening the Group’s resilience.

New Customer Value Creation

For greater progress in realizing “A Theme Park for Security, Health & Wellbeing,” we started to work on digital transformation (DX) to develop solutions in five areas by leveraging our strengths. Our RDP strategy is to develop unimitatable, unique solutions from the RDP and eventually build ecosystems. The next course of action was clarified for areas where a focus on increasing the value of existing businesses would help develop solutions (disaster prevention & mitigation, mobility, agriculture) and areas where solutions should be developed by anticipating the future ecosystems (healthy aging and nursing care).

In the Domestic P&C Insurance Business, we are changing the underwriting mechanism through DX initiatives. Information asymmetry has been reduced through data integration and good progress has been made in developing a platform for turning all employees in marketing into underwriters. In FY2021, we managed to improve underwriting result by changing underwriting conditions of specific policies. As such we will focus on increasing the value of existing businesses with respect to the three areas (disaster prevention & mitigation, mobility, agriculture) where substantial improvement in productivity and profitability by transforming existing businesses would help deliver high value added services. In these areas, therefore, we will focus on improving the value of our existing businesses for the time being.

The nursing care industry faces two major social challenges which are widening gap between labor supply and demand caused by the rising demand due to the growth of older population and declining supply due to low birthrate, and soaring social security expenditure. Since it is necessary to improve operational quality as well as productivity to address these challenges, Sompo Care started to cooperate with external nursing care providers based on the results of PoC and solutions developed. As such we are working on initiatives to become a platformer by developing the RDP business in the two areas where social needs for ecosystems are strong (nursing care and healthcare).

SOMPO’s New Work Style

One of the core strategies of the Sompo Group’s Mid-Term Management Plan is to promote a New Work Style, with the goal of improving the job satisfaction and happiness of each of its employees, and achieving an overwhelmingly high level of productivity. This New Work Style will be built on individual employees seeking to achieve their personal “My Purpose”—with the ultimate goal of realizing SOMPO’s Purpose. To achieve this, we aim to Create the ideal group of talent who share the Three Core Value of Mission-Driven, Professionalism, and Diversity & Inclusion. We will implement various Groupwide policies to establish this workforce, and we will verify the progress of these policies and implement improvements using Human Capital Impact Pass, a framework that systematizes and visualizes the status of these initiatives.

The Sompo Group is carrying out various initiatives to establish a Mission-Driven workforce, with two of the key initiatives being: the implementation of “My Purpose 1-on-1,” which seeks to empower employees to adopt a self-directed work style by incorporating My Purpose into their work and engaging in regular employee-supervisor dialogue; and the establishment of a “Self-chosen Career-Development System,” which enables employees to choose a career path based on their own My Purpose. Through these initiatives, the Group encourages employees to align their individual My Purpose with the Groupwide SOMPO’s Purpose, pursue both in their day-to-day work, and so achieve improved job satisfaction and productivity.

To improve Professionalism, the Sompo Group carries out training for selected employees of all levels, with the goal of nurturing human resources capable of driving Group management forward on a global basis. For younger employees, we offer the in-house SOMPO Global University, in partnership with the National University of Singapore Business School. Sompo Japan has also established Sompo Japan University for online learning. By providing employees with opportunities for self-directed learning, it supports their efforts to take on new challenges. Furthermore, we are working to develop effective digital human resources so that we can implement a business model premised on the use of digital technology. To this end, we have assigned all our employees to one of three categories—DX Planning Talents; DX Expert Talents; and DX Utilization Talents—and we are implementing training systems tailored to each category.

The Sompo Group has positioned diversity and inclusion (D&I) as part of its business strategy, and is promoting it under the slogan “Diversity for Growth.” One of the goals of promoting D&I is to encourage innovation. In order to realize SOMPO’s Purpose, we need to welcome the “good clashes of knowledge” that occur when diverse people interact, and build on them to innovate and find new value. We intend to facilitate major innovation by fomenting a Group-wide culture in which employees share their individual My Purposes and respect and accept each other.