Stephen Porteous
Managing Director IPPA
Stephen leads Innovation’s business in Asia; including Innovation’s IFRS 17 delivery framework and LIBOR cessation. Quite a leap from the car industry, where he started his career as an engineer 1991.
A car might have 10,000 components and mind-blowing build complexity. Development of a product may take 3000 people up to 6 years and cost 3 billion USD. Revenue implications on sales of a product can be 10 billion USD a year during its production life.
In this environment, leaders put great emphasis on understanding outcomes of any initiative before committing time, money and people. The greatest successes happened when implications of ideas were fully thought through prior to capital commitment. Failures happened when ideas were pushed through without first understanding strategic implications, or when evidence of the implications was ignored.
Experience I gained in engineering design, business strategy and delivering multi-million-dollar programmes in the car industry engrained three principles:
I left the car industry in 2005 and undertook strategy, change and delivery projects in unrelated sectors. Common to each was that the experts involved generally knew their details, but were challenged in stitching together a desirable outcome.
In 2012 Innovation and Towers Watson asked me to review and propose improvements to a periodic valuation undertaken on behalf of a client. Within the first few days my mind boggled at my introduction to stochastic modelling and the complexity of assumption derivations. Then the model runs ... and they went on forever. However, like my previous assignments, I asked lots of dumb questions, prompting the actuaries to articulate the process and challenges. This provided us with a map of what we could change to deliver the desired outcome.
I simply empowered them to give me the information for me to imagine what was possible. Then using my own brand of expertise, we worked together to develop a delivery framework.
If people are willing to be open, there is always a way to deliver the outcome. The rub is, all too often people don’t see the big picture, they focus on their part of a product, proposition, model, process or system. They need someone to help be a bridge to the rest of a business.
In 2013 I moved to Asia with Innovation and my most recent projects are detailed below. My recent focus has included corporate back-office change strategy for the coming IFRS changes in the insurance industry. I have been able to do this by serving chief actuaries and chief financial officers in delivering financial close, actuarial modelling capital management and accounting initiatives.
My insurance work in Asia includes:
Has an ability to draw together expert opinions together and develop them into strategies that deliver success
Has managed around 80 change projects and 6 large-scale programmes
Has designed and delivered business transformation and Target Operating Models (TOMs) in 13 organisations