Dear partner,

I would like to express my warmest wishes to you and your families for this new year.  I hope that you have spent happy times over the festive season – and that you return, as we do at OneLife, with renewed vigour and intent for 2018!

OneLife 2017 performance

I am proud to say that 2017 marked a year of significant progress at OneLife.  In addition to reaffirming our leadership position in the Belgian market, we also grew our reach in other core markets.  These include France, Denmark, Luxembourg and the Nordics, with development well underway for the UK, as well as for our most recent regions – Iberia and Latin America.  We recorded a new overall business premium for the year of over 40% compared to 2016, thanks to your trust in confiding new business to our company.  This diversification of business across markets and extending our distribution network strongly supports our strategic growth.  

Also in 2017, OneLife celebrated its first anniversary under the ‘OneLife’ brand.  Our new brand is a key catalyst in propelling us into new markets and forging lasting relationships with our business partners. They tell us that they appreciate our expertise, agility, digital mindset – and the focus we maintain on service.   Our value proposition which combines wealth planning expertise with extensive cross-border knowledge together with a strong capability in non-traditional assets are all key differentiators for OneLife in today’s marketplace .    

The tenth edition of the OneLife Investment Forum held in Brussels in October epitomised our new brand promise, with record attendance from our international partners, fund houses and asset managers – and the participation of top key-note speakers and influencers

Investment in enhancing the partner-client experience

New Solutions

Enhancing our existing product range, OneLife launched a series of new products to cater to the needs of our partners and their clients.  These included: Capitalisation Finland, a Belgian Pension Product (IPT), Wealth Spain & Wealth Portugal, Capitalisation Denmark and Capitalisation Luxembourg.

Structural changes

In 2017, OneLife completed the stream-lining of its business operations.  Today, OneLife operates simply as The OneLife Company SA, held directly by The OneLife Holding sàrl.   

Technology upgrade

OneLife successfully completed the next phase in the consolidation of its IT systems in 2017 – migrating to a single policy administration platform, the final stages of which will be completed in early 2018.

Digital innovation

As a recognised leader in digital technologies, OneLife deployed a number of key initiatives in 2017 to improve the customer experience.  These include innovation in the following areas:

• The availability of the OneLife OneApp for partners across our markets, giving access to portfolio information 24/7
• The same App now also dedicated to all our clients allowing them to consult their portfolios on-line 24/7
• The introduction for the French and Belgian markets of B2B data exchange – or aggregation services – enabling the consultation of client portfolios, including life assurance policies, in a single view. 
• OneLife launched its Digital Days in June 2017 to fully engage employees in the digital transformation process.  Employees across departments at OneLife took part in two days of discovery and training in digital technologies with the aim of raising awareness of its advantages and helping them to implement digital innovation in their daily jobs to improve the partner-client experience.  In recognition of its Digital Days, OneLife was awarded the Luxembourg Employee Experience Award by HROne.
• Training and development at OneLife went digital too in 2017 with the introduction in September of the Lynda.com learning platform from LinkedIn.  This tool, offering over 10,000 e-courses, actively encourages employees to learn on a regular basis across all disciplines with certification awarded to acknowledge completion.
• The automation of parts of the OneLife service experience was implemented during the year to help free up our dedicated Customer Services teams to deal with higher value live customer queries – and so better manage the relationships with our valued partners and clients.

People

OneLife pursued its talent acquisition strategy to support business growth, reinforcing its expertise across all areas of its unique selling proposition to partners and clients.  In this context, a number of key positions were filled so strengthening our sales, wealth structuring and client servicing capabilities.  OneLife was awarded the Best Legal Department Award, Switzerland, Luxembourg & Belgium by Leader’s League France in recognition of our highly client-centric approach in catering to clients’ often complex wealth management needs.

Regulation

During 2017, OneLife prepared the introduction of new EU financial regulation to ensure that its business is in line with current obligations.  PRIIPs  (Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products) as of 1 January 2018, GDPR  (General Data Protection Regulation) and IDD  (Insurance Distribution Directive) will become live in May and October  2018 respectively.

Corporate Social Responsibility

OneLife and its staff were involved in a number of fund-raising events for various charitable organisations during 2017.  These included the ELA Association which conducts research into leukodystrophy and SOS Children’s Villages Belgium who support disadvantaged children.  We also celebrated Luxembourg Diversity Day creating a Diversity Wall illustrating the many cultures, nationalities and languages which make OneLife unique.

OneLife 2018 – what’s on the agenda?

2018 will be a pivotal year for OneLife.  With the reorganisation behind us and significant investment in place to support our growth ambitions, we are now well positioned to leverage our international distribution network and develop relationships with key partners based on a solid value proposition, digital delivery and expert teams in place for each of the markets in which we operate.  

On the product side in 2018, we will deploy new solutions to meet the requirements of our international clients in Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden – in addition to new solutions for Latin American clients, including Peru and other South American countries.

We will continue to implement our Digital roadmap through digital end-to-end processes which make it simpler for our partners and clients to deal with us. 

Examples of initiatives to be implemented in 2018 are:

• Dematerialisation, a process which allows the policyholder and his intermediary to view statements directly on the firm’s secure portal, youroffice-yourassets, instead of in paper form by post.  The pdf may be downloaded and stored as appropriate for future reference.  The dematerialised statement has the same legal value as the paper form.  Efficiency, security and speed are all watchwords of this new paperless process.
• Accelerating the client on-boarding process through the automation of KYC and AML checks has been through the test-drive stage at OneLife and will be launched in the first quarter of the year.  RegTech, or Regulation Technolgy as it is widely known, provides the Compliance team with a powerful technology tool to run the checks automatically.  OneLife partnered with KYCTech, a Luxembourg start-up company, to establish a Proof of Concept for the platform. 
• As the final piece in the digitalisation of our on-boarding and service offering, OneLife will introduce an electronic signature capability in the first quarter 2018.  The new service will allow partners and clients with access to youroffice- yourassets, to sign digitally, eliminating the time-consuming process of physical signatures on switches and top-ups in a first phase and other operations in later stages. 
• Initiated in 2017, OneLife will continue to collaborate with multi-market aggregator firms to facilitate B2B data collection allowing life assurance policies to be viewed as part of a client’s overall portfolio
• Subscribing a life insurance contract online will become a reality in 2018! OneLife is partnering with a French company in 2018 to offer a fully online solution, so opening the  gateway to the development of similar opportunities for other markets in the near future
• OneLife is also innovating in the area of RPA (Robotic Process Automation).  A number of Bots have been launched in 2017 and are already serving the business.  A larger scale deployment is planned for 2018
• We will introduce a Virtual Agent capability on the youroffice secure web site in the third quarter of the year. Our virtual agent is an interactive on-line customer service agent, providing advice, guidance and assistance to users – quickly and effectively – to help them find information and respond to their questions.

OneLife looks forward to the challenges of 2018!  I am confident that we will continue on the growth path that we have set ourselves. 

I would like to thank you, our valued partners, for your ongoing collaboration – and to assure you of our unwavering focus to deliver robust, cross-border solutions, which  provide relevant, international alternatives using life assurance for you and your clients.

With my warm wishes for 2018.

Best regards

Marc Stevens

Chief Executive Officer, OneLife