Well-being in the cloud
            

This large, independent, publicly listed, pan-Asian life insurance and financial services group based in Hong Kong has a presence in 18 markets in the Asia-Pacific region. With over 20,000 employees and tens of thousands of agents offering life and medical insurance, it serves holders of over 36 million policies.

Imagine every time you go for a run or a bike ride you could collect points that can be spent like real money. You could pay for a cup of coffee with these points, get a discounted gym membership, or even buy an airline ticket to go see your loved ones.

There is such an app—it offers points as a reward for fitness. As part of one large Asian insurance company’s customer offerings, the app’s points can be used for specialized goods and services from partners in each user’s country. Fitness data counts as points, and these can be used to get anything from cinema tickets or a gym discount in Hong Kong, to airline tickets in Singapore.

The company has customers in 18 different countries from Hong Kong to Thailand and India and operates separately across these countries, while driving standardization on core technology platforms and improving cost efficiency centrally.

As part of its overall corporate strategy in 2020, the company declared a mission to move as much of its IT infrastructure as possible to the scalable Microsoft® Azure® cloud environment.

Challenges to IT

The fitness app program, launched across the company’s operating countries in 2016/2017, prompted the need for a more robust IT infrastructure.

The company wanted to provide a seamless, integrated real-time experience to its customers, agents and partners, but had a lot of legacy that it needed to deal with. It was not a straightforward journey given some of its 20- to 30-year-old systems.

“We embarked on a journey to look at the holistic experience, to provide the right experience for our users’ journeys. User design is very important, so if we can't provide the right data at the right time, or if the data isn't cleansed, it isn't meaningful,” said an executive at the company.

The company knew that this meant, ultimately, the experience it was providing customers was not necessarily reflective of its mission. It needed real-time integration to provide the right experience.

It was also considering things like cloud usage, improving data security and using more analytics, but realized that although some of its markets were very digitally savvy, there were many that were not. It had to look at not just technology, but also its people and organization.

The insurance company needed a digital partner it could trust.

A real transformation

It chose Software AG and webMethods for its robust and secure backbone to integrate and sync data with its different legacy back-end applications.

Because the fitness app program runs across most of the operating countries, the company needed to drive a centralized infrastructure and technology standard in order to replicate to each of the countries. This led to a company-wide site license for webMethods and several other Software AG products.

Once the app was up and running successfully, the company made a commitment to reduce IT infrastructure costs and increase security by eliminating its on-premises exposure to go all-cloud. It soon realized that some of its more load-heavy and data-sensitive systems needed to remain on-premises and once again chose webMethods to help build a hybrid solution.

Managing the insurance process

The business of insurance is heavily regulated and data intensive. There are hundreds of manual and automated processes from customer claims, onboarding, underwriting and partner programs to application management and point redemption.

When processes are not automated or transparent, the customer can suffer—and customer satisfaction is key to retaining and gaining business in the competitive insurance landscape.

So, on top of the insurance company’s mission to move to the cloud, it also needed to significantly expand its IT ability to support customer transactions digitally. To do so, it had to automate back-office processes associated with the provision of services.

The aim was to improve efficiency, services, productivity and experience for customers, staff and distributors by improving its process management. The company chose Software AG’s ARIS business process management solution for the task. Software AG’s commercial flexibility, with site license contracts for webMethods and ARIS, is helping this insurance giant to build flexibility and resilience into its future business and to take a safe and healthy journey to the Microsoft Azure cloud.