Many of you will already know David Watts. After working as an Account Executive in our Business Development team with some of our largest multinational clients for more than 18 years, he took up a new position leading the dedicated Member Management function in July this year.

We sat down with David (virtually of course!) to find out how the transition to his new role is going, what he believes differentiates our network and what he’s most looking forward to doing in post-pandemic life.

Thanks for chatting with us David. How have the first few months of your new role been?

Not a problem. A lthough it’s been a bit of a whirlwind and really strange not to be able to meet people in person. I’m lucky in that it’s an internal move so I know the business and lots of our network partners (members) already. That’s definitely helped me bridge the gap of not being able to travel and meet people in person or attend events. 

I’m enjoying the new challenge of moving from being client-facing to member-facing. It’s great to learn more about the operational side of the business, too. Our members work closely with every area of the business, so that means the team and I work with every function in MAXIS too.

That’s great – a new challenge is always interesting and adds variety to the day. You mentioned working with every function in MAXIS, but what specifically is the role you and your team perform? 

I’d say that our role is really about making MAXIS as easy as possible to work with. Our members are at the core of what we do as a business, so what we do is based on putting them first, looking after their interests and finding ways to improve efficiencies and working practices across the business to ensure we all succeed together – the member, our shared clients and MAXIS.

What do you see as the greatest strength of the MAXIS network? 

The members themselves are probably our greatest strength in my opinion. We work with specialists that are very often the top provider, or very near the top at least, in their local market. Something unique about our network too is the MetLife and AXA partnership. Our shareholders tend to have greater strength in different regions, so through that we have great coverage globally. Over 80% of our overall premium is with AXA and MetLife companies. 

The other 20% is placed with independent members who are all top insurers in their own right and all this just adds to the strength of our network.

Whether the member is MetLife, AXA or independent, most of them have been part of the network for years and we very rarely stop working with them. That means they’re used to doing business with us, there’s a trusted partnership and they understand our clients’ needs. 

How can we improve as a network? What challenges are there?

It’s all about being efficient at what we do together. We know our clients have a huge demand for the data from their global programmes, so our challenge is always to ensure we are capturing this effectively and efficiently. We’re investing in new tools and technology to help with that. 

Members are at the core of everything we do as a business and we can’t achieve our goals or help our clients achieve their goals without them. We work closely with each of our partners to improve on the pain points and become more effective. Each year, we carry out a scorecard process where we take the pulse of the network and review our performance from the member’s perspective and vice versa so that we are continually improving together.  

What are you most looking forward to after the pandemic?

Now, that’s a tough one. There’s so many things! From a work perspective, I guess I’m most looking forward to getting out into the network, meeting our members and introducing them to our global clients. It’s great that we’ve been able to meet virtually over the last few months, but I definitely think you build stronger relationships in person.  

In my personal life, obviously like everyone, I want to be able to go on holiday outside of the rainy UK and get back to some semblance of normality! I definitely miss the ‘old days’ of being carefree and spontaneous! I guess we didn’t know how fortunate we were before all this, being able to socialise with people, hug our relatives and not have to think and plan our personal lives in such detail. Fingers crossed we can get back to our old lives soon. 

Thanks for talking with us, David. We all have our fingers crossed we can get back to normality soon!