Insurer Old Mutual will migrate its digital customer platforms, core insurance applications and product administration systems to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud.
The company will migrate over 1 000 applications to AWS, shutting down its data centres by early 2022.
AWS is set to open data centres in SA next year. This after Microsoft this year launched two data centre regions in SA earlier this year. Enterprise software company Oracle also has plans to open its own facilitates locally next year.
Old Mutual is integrating AWS’s analytics and machine learning (ML) services into its business processes to drive greater insights to help the company build more personalised customer-facing applications and experiences.
The insurer is building a data lake on AWS, called the information fabric, which will provide a single, consistent view of a customer’s information across the entire business.
Old Mutual says historically it was challenging for customers to access their financial portfolio because their information was distributed across multiple data sources.
Using information fabric, Old Mutual is refining its MyOldMutual customer portal, giving customers a view of their entire financial portfolio in one place at any time.
Using Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, Old Mutual has developed a chatbot for its Web site that provides instant responses to customers, through the customer’s preferred channel – voice, e-mail, Web or text – 24 hours a day.
Old Mutual is also pursuing other AWS ML technologies, including Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, and Amazon Personalise, a real-time personalisation and recommendation service, to develop new real-time financial services, including automated, self-service investment options for customers to make informed decisions when planning and saving for their financial goals.
“AWS provides us with the depth and breadth of services we need to innovate like a start-up, with the security expected from Africa’s oldest and most trusted financial services company,” says Johnson Idesoh, chief information officer at Old Mutual.
“With AWS, we can rapidly experiment at lower costs and push the successful experiments into production faster, allowing us to improve the experience for existing customers and attract new ones. AWS understands this high level of customer focus, which is why we see them as far more than just a technology supplier. We are working closely with AWS to not only serve our customers, but also support the development of technology skills in Africa by offering ongoing cloud training programs for employees.”
“Financial services organisations are turning to AWS because we offer them the broadest capabilities, best performance and highest levels of security,” says Andy Isherwood, vice-president and managing director of EMEA at AWS.
“For nearly two centuries, Old Mutual has been trusted by people across Africa. By moving off rigid, legacy technologies to flexible and scalable cloud technologies on AWS, Old Mutual will continue to maintain trust and delight their customers by offering more personalised services.”
In March, Standard Bank confirmed it had selected AWS to "accelerate mass migration, drive digital transformation and enhance security posture in the cloud".
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