Danny Chia Kai Yan has always been a problem solver at heart, which explains why he has always enjoyed working with coding and development programmes that help businesses maximise their efficiency. A certified Lean Six Sigma practitioner, Danny was also among the pioneers behind the digitalisation and automation effort employed by AXA Malaysia, slightly over two years ago. This enabled him to code bots that optimised workplace efficiency by automating the routine and instruction-based jobs within the organisation. When Danny was nominated to attend the AXA Leadapreneur Accelerator Programme, he was excited about flexing his knowledge and learning new skills that will make him better in his role as the Vice President (Business Process Improvement and Automation) at AXA Affin General Insurance. On Day 1 of the programme, he even proposed taking one his innovation projects and expanding on them to produce better results but when he was told that he had to move out of his comfort zone that doesn’t involve his current BAU (Business As Usual) projects, Danny was quick to adapt as he began looking at areas of improvement that his organisation could focus on to yield results with minimised resource spending. That was how Danny came up with the idea of improving client outreach by introducing the AXA Warrior Referral Reward Programme that rewards individuals who successfully introduce new clients. On a larger scale, the programme leverages on their existing client base to help market AXA insurance products without compromising on any personal data. The programme simply refers a friend or a family member to the AXA policies and should the referees express any interest, they are then referred to the sales division to sign up. The referrer, in this case, will have to use AXA corporate survey to submit his recommendation without the need to collect any other personal data of the referees. When a referee successfully purchases an AXA policy, the referrer then gets rewarded accordingly. Danny’s idea for the 16-week programme was treated like a pilot campaign that was focused on their internal employees before it can be rolled out on a larger scale to encompass their client database. This provides the company time to mobilise their resources and iron out technicalities such as gaining consent from the relevant parties and working out an excellent reward system that was at par or much better than their competitors’. Although Danny was aware that his idea wasn’t new in the business world, it was certainly on track with what AXA’s competitors have recently embarked on. More importantly, the programme creates an interest that will improve AXA’s brand presence, translating it into bigger and better business turnovers. To attract the attention of his colleagues, Danny even created teaser videos and made use of digital channels like Facebook@Work to reach out, and safe to say that his campaign worked like a charm as he made his postings fun and engaging – an important communication tool for leadapreneurs to ensure the success of such campaigns. As referral programmes are tougher to sell, Danny projected the programme will help him create tangible results with over RM200,000 worth of sales in 15 months, and if he successfully achieves them, Danny believes that he has the ability to combine his existing skills set with the experience he has gained in this programme and come up with a bigger and better innovation to grow AXA. If it wasn’t for Leadapreneur, Danny believes that he would have stayed in his comfort zone much longer, but this 16-week shake-up had not only made him bolder, but it also taught how to think like a leadapreneur – agile, innovative, focused and creative. In fact, Danny can’t wait to move it forward as he has laid the foundation to bring his project to the next level by automating the referral tracking system, digitising referral codes and introducing a better reward system based on the product value. Congratulations Danny for becoming a Champion of the Accelerator!