Pan-African financial services group Old Mutual has closed its on-premise datacentres and migrated its entire IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In a statement released to the media, AWS said the migration includes Old Mutual’s banking, insurance and wealth management systems.
The full migration involved moving more than 2 000 on-premises servers, 215 applications, 1 786 databases, and more than 500 websites.
According to AWS the move will accelerate innovation by reducing the time required for new application testing from months to minutes.
The cloud services provider added that Old Mutual will decrease financial transaction processing time by two-thirds, reduce downtime by 50%, and “streamline the development of new and more relevant insurance products, and drive innovation across its business with machine learning (ML).”
One of Old Mutual’s main reasons to migrate is to leverage AWS capabilities to better anticipate customer needs and develop the next generation of financial products and experiences.
The company will leverage AWS ML and generative artificial intelligence (AI) services - including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models - to generate real-time, personalised financial forecasting and recommendations for customers.
Examples of benefits include the ability to anticipate changing savings needs as customers approach retirement, recommend insurance products based on changing income levels and life stages, and help entrepreneurs plan for investing their incomes as their businesses grow. The personalisation services are made possible by the expansion of Information Fabric, the data lake that Old Mutual established on AWS.
“The single, consistent view of customers provided by Information Fabric enables individualised recommendations and more seamless, intuitive customer experiences, including combined client rewards programs that enable points earned in one area of the business to be redeemed through another,” reads an excerpt from the statement.
Cloud-first mindset
Old Mutual is also incorporating AWS training into management courses to help senior managers and leaders adopt a cloud-first mindset and product development strategy.
The financial group said that since 2019, 50% of its business and technical leaders have earned at least one AWS Certification.
Old Mutual attests that cloud-first thinking is informing its expansion strategy across the 14 countries it serves in Africa.
“Innovative partnerships with cloud-first vendors, such as the API management platform Kong Konnect and the data management platform Tamr Cloud, will help to improve financial accessibility in these markets through innovative banking as a service (BaaS) solutions,” Old Mutual stated.
May Govender, acting CIO for Old Mutual, said, “Daily server outages. Disconnected financial products. Ballooning on-premises costs. Those are all challenges we leave behind as we go all-in on AWS.”
Since 2014, Old Mutual has leveraged AWS’s broad portfolio of cloud services, including compute, storage, analytics, and databases, to digitally transform the business and unlock innovation for customers.
In 2019, the company selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and launched its ambitious migration project.
Share