Manulife names Sarah Chapman global chief marketing and customer experience officer | Insurance Business
Manulife names Sarah Chapman global chief marketing and customer experience officer
The promotion comes just five months after she took over as CMO for Manulife Canada
Insurance News
Manulife has appointed Sarah Chapman (pictured) as global chief marketing and customer experience officer, effective January 1, 2027.
Chapman will join Manulife’s executive leadership team, reporting to president and CEO Phil Witherington, and will lead the company’s global marketing organization with responsibility for brand, marketing and enterprise customer experience strategy across Manulife’s operations in Canada, Asia, Europe and its John Hancock business in the US.
“Sarah is a proven global leader with deep knowledge of our business, customers and enterprise strategy,” said Witherington. “Her appointment reflects the strength of our internal talent pipeline and is the result of thoughtful succession planning.”
Chapman currently serves as chief marketing officer for Manulife Canada, where she also leads the company’s global digital, customer centricity and sustainability agendas.
“I’m honoured to take on this role and am excited to help make lives better for more than 37 million customers around the world,” she said. She succeeds Karen Leggett, who is retiring from Manulife at the end of 2026.
A fast-moving internal career
The pace of Chapman’s rise within Manulife is worth spelling out, since the release itself understates it. She joined Manulife in 2020 as global chief sustainability officer, arriving from Deloitte Canada, where she was national director of sustainability and social impact advisory, after earlier work leading Hitachi’s global social innovation business out of Sydney.
In 2023, she added the chief marketing officer role for Manulife Wealth and Asset Management, and she was only appointed chief marketing officer for Manulife Canada this past April, a role in which Manulife Canada president and CEO Naveed Irshad described her as “a driving force behind Manulife’s shift toward data-led, customer-centric, digitally enabled decision-making.”
Being elevated to a global executive leadership seat roughly five months into a regional CMO posting is a notably fast progression, even accounting for the sustainability and wealth management roles she held before it, and underscores that Manulife is treating this less as a conventional succession queue and more as a deliberate acceleration of a specific executive it wants in the top team.
Why the expanded title matters more than the promotion speed
The customer experience component added to Chapman’s title is the more substantive strategic detail here. Folding enterprise customer experience directly into the global marketing mandate, rather than keeping it as a separate function, suggests Manulife wants brand strategy and the practical customer-facing experience, digital, service, and product interaction, designed together going forward rather than coordinated after the fact between separate teams.
That’s consistent with the broader AI-driven customer experience push this desk has tracked across Manulife’s business this year. Insurance Businessreported in January on Manulife’s upgraded MAUDE underwriting engine, and by mid-year Manulife was named the top life insurer for AI maturity for a second consecutive year in the Evident AI Index, with the company reiterating its target of generating more than $1 billion in enterprise value from AI by 2027.
That same underwriting-and-experience strategy has since drawn a direct competitor: BMO Insurance launched its own accelerated underwriting platform this summer, explicitly playing catch-up to Manulife’s eight-year head start. Chapman’s own background, spanning sustainability, digital transformation and now customer experience, positions her specifically to bridge Manulife’s AI and ESG-driven brand narrative with how customers actually experience the company day to day.
What this means for advisors and brokers
For advisors and brokers working with Manulife, a leadership change in global marketing rarely has immediate, direct implications for product or pricing.
The more relevant signal is longer-term: as Manulife continues consolidating customer experience and marketing under a single executive who has also run its sustainability agenda, brokers should expect continued investment in Manulife’s digital and self-service tools, likely framed around both AI capability and sustainability positioning, as a deliberate, coordinated brand strategy rather than a series of disconnected initiatives.
