Johannesburg, 25 Apr 2023
South African property and casualty (P&C) insurers seeking to transform their businesses to become more agile should not try to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by building new systems from the ground up themselves. Instead, they should leverage proven platforms and partnerships to fast-track their progress.
This topic came under discussion during a webinar on digital transformation for insurance, hosted by Guidewire in partnership with systems integrator Zensar and ITWeb last week.
This was also an opportunity to announce the launch of the Guidewire Cloud (SaaS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in South Africa, and to showcase Guidewire and Zensar’s capabilities and how they are supporting transformation at Santam.
Leo Holesgrove, executive advisor South Africa at Guidewire, noted that the pace of change in the P&C sector is accelerating. “Insurers need to turn core systems into systems of insight, and they must become more agile and efficient. The Guidewire platform launching on AWS in South Africa puts local tenancy in place, offering flexibility, and peace of mind regarding data protection. The value gap between cloud and self-managed infrastructure is growing every six months, but with a SaaS model, we take care of things like that. It makes it so much easier for insurers to focus on innovation,” he said.
Terrence Naidoo, solutions architecture leader at AWS, said: “Insurers need to enable transformation at a time when they face significant challenges. Factors such as changing customer demands, regulation, competition, recession, FATF greylisting, and load shedding are making it difficult for insurers. With more uncertainty than ever, we are seeing more local insurers turning to the cloud. We have tens of thousands of active customers in SA, with the financial sector and insurers using the AWS cloud to streamline operations, focus on innovation and grow".
Naidoo stated: “We see cloud as a continuum that extends all the way to the edge. Guidewire runs inside the AWS Cape Town infrastructure region, but with all the use cases AWS offers, we cater for not just the region, but also compute at the edge and rugged edge, the ability to run on VMware cloud on AWS, the ability to operate on customers’ own premises, and new local zones closer to where customers may be, for workloads that are latency sensitive.”
He noted that AWS provides more than 200 fully featured services, including compute, storage, analytics, and security, and over 500 instance types. Guidewire uses AWS native services to help insurers leapfrog their competition and get to the forefront of technology and insurance in the country.
Outlining their transformation journey using the Guidewire Cloud, Santam speakers advised other organizations not to build solutions in-house when vendors had already invested heavily in building similar solutions. “Stay closer to out of the box, partner with a systems integrator who knows how to do it. If you try to do your own thing, it is likely to take longer and inhibit your own growth” said Mark Fuller, the Program Manager who led the Guidewire Cloud transition at Santam.
Fuller said: “Guidewire Policy Center and Guidewire Billing Center have enabled speed to market, effectiveness, efficiency and cost savings for Santam. Guidewire Claim Center moved from a complex claims legacy landscape to a mature, feature rich and configurable product that enables effectiveness and efficiency, cost savings, and seamless, consistent customer experience.”
Crause explained that the Santam modernization journey was now in wave 2, with the company preparing for a move to the cloud in wave 3. “Our strategy is to provide multi-channel solutions and platforms to support sales, clients and intermediaries. Our focus is to enable growth, improve ease of doing business and client experience. We are very keen to take advantage of the cloud for ecosystems, big data and analytics, digitalization and IT simplification,” he said.
Animesh Mukherjee, insurance solutions and consulting leader at Zensar said the landscape is changing rapidly across systems of engagement, systems of intelligence, systems of record and partner systems, creating a complex environment for insurers to navigate.
“With so many different challenges and priorities a certain amount of analysis is needed. Organisations need to avoid analysis paralysis and continue to move forward. They need to get their priorities right and remain agile. No plan is set in stone, so organisations need to be agile and willing to make course corrections as they go along.”
Noting that ‘the future is going to be fast’, he advised organisations to ditch inertia, supported by constant learning, and having the right people in place at the right time.
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