High Peak
High Peak is an ambitious Prudential Financial venture to commercialize Prudential assets externally. High Peak implements Zero Distance not only with its employees, operations and customers, but also with the incumbent insurance carrier that is its parent company.
High Peak began with a solution in need of a problem. We turned that around by zeroing the distance with our customers - both financial advisors and clients - with deep, ethnographic research to understand what keeps them up at night? After multiple rounds of testing against three criteria: customer desirability, technical feasibility and economic viability, we found a critical pain point that Prudential's industry-leading AI-enabled underwriting models can solve: individualized healthcare and long-term care expense planning. We found that 80% of clients go to their financial advisors to discuss healthcare and long-term care plans but a staggering 90% of them find this process challenging.
Both advisors and clients describe these costs as the shipwreck waiting to happen, but today no trustworthy and tailored solution exists to plan for these expenses today. With our aging population and lack of defined benefit options in the market today, offering a sharper solution to this pain point has been critical.
Trust is critical, so we systematically leverage proprietary and publicly available data to continually sharpen the insights, and maintain industry-leading data privacy around all PII and PHI.
But we did not stop there. We continue to run multiple rounds of research as we develop and improve upon the tool so we can proactively incorporate advisor feedback. We use ethnographic, quantitative and even GenAI enabled interviews to get qual research at a high n. We continually strive to reduce the distance between the customer and ourselves. And we do this with regular touchpoints amongst team members, ensuring that team members are able to speak up and share critical feedback.
While doing this, we have to stay extremely close to the parent company operations - without allowing the parent company to slow down the urgency of a start up - thereby eliminating entrenched organizational barriers. We set up FAST teams to reduce the distance between High Peak and Prudential and enable fast decision making while setting up a GTM Acceleration board of C-suite ELT leaders at Prudential to empower High Peak for growth. To that end, we're positioning High Peak for external funding as well to broaden the capital pool and gain broader strategic investment, thereby further closing the gap between the market and High Peak.
Finally, we're committed to an ecosystem of openness, equality and co-creation - we've shared our customer learnings with juggernauts in the industry including Genworth and SwissRe - because we believe that this is a critical issue to solve for with our aging population. We can't go it alone, and instead believe that by driving the industry forward through partnership we'll having a fighting chance to solve the retirement crisis.
