Manulife reports earnings up on Asia growth, says adding more AI tools

TORONTO – Manulife Financial Corp. reported a profit increase last quarter that was driven by growth in Asia, while the company says it’s also seeing a boost from its push into artificial intelligence.
The insurance giant reported a third quarter adjusted profit of $1.83 billion, up four per cent from last year.
“We generated significant top-line growth … led by broad-based growth in Asia,” said chief executive Roy Gori on an earnings call Thursday.
The company’s operations in Asia saw net income rise almost tenfold to $606 million from $63 million last year. Core, or adjusted, earnings from the region were up 17 per cent.
The region saw higher sales across most markets, concentrated in Hong Kong, where Manulife is seeing gains from both residents and mainland Chinese visitors.
Manulife’s rise in profits also come as it keeps pushing further into the use of AI, including a pilot project in Singapore where agents used generative AI sales scripts.
The scripts helped lead to a five per cent boost in repurchasing rates, said Gori, with plans to extend it to other markets before the end of the year.
In North America, the company has given 15 per cent of contact centre agents an AI call summary and contract lookup tool that it says has on average reduced call times by 12 per cent.
Manulife has already launched 11 use cases with another 13 coming before year end, plus 16 more in development, said Gori.
“These encompass all areas of our business and are being ambitiously scaled to maximize business value,” he said.
The push further into digital comes as Manulife targets an efficiency ratio of below 45 per cent. Year-to-date, it’s right on the line after shaving 0.5 percentage points off last year’s 45.5 per cent.
Efforts to contain expenses and focus resources on high-growth areas also led Manulife to cut about 2.5 per cent of the workforce at its global wealth and asset management team in the quarter. It recorded a $20 million restructuring charge as well.
Asked about the impact of the U.S. election, Gori said he didn’t see it as a major factor for the performance of the business.
“We are a very diversified business across three broad geographies, which has really helped us weather a whole lot of different weathers and storms,” said Gori.
“We think that we’re going to see a little bit of volatility off the back of the announcements, but that will normalize.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
Companies in this story: (TSX:MFC)
Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version had the wrong time period for the expense ratio.