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The insurance industry is undergoing a sea change, with IT playing a crucial role in rolling out digital customer experiences for policyholders and agents, as in-person meetings all but vanish in the post-pandemic era.

This pivot to digital customer experiences has become a new insurance industry imperative, as John Aflac, Liberty Mutual, MassMutual, MetLife, and a host of other insurers have embraced digital strategies for interacting with and delivering new services to customers — in some cases, integrating advanced cloud technologies such as analytics and machine learning to design new insurance policies.

Bill Pappas, who joined MetLife as head of global technology and operations three years ago to drive the CEO’s customer-first strategy, exemplifies the new insurance CIO ethos.

“We are paying very close attention to trends from a customer perspective. We call our approach high tech and high touch, because that takes into account the very clear feedback that we’re getting from our customers — that they want digital solutions to take the transactional nature from our relationship away in a way that is intuitive and secure, but they want us to be there when it matters the most,” he says.

For Pappas, the customer has become the “North Star” in the digital era, and other insurance CIOs concur, as improving the customer experience and operational excellence — not revenue growth — tops the list of insurance digitalization initiatives in 2023, according to a recent Gartner survey of CIOs across 81 countries.

“The customer experience in life insurance has not been very digital,” says Gartner analyst Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, noting the very traditional human-to-human interactions in the industry. “Now it’s really more about [digital] customer experience and operational efficiency, particularly given we’re just coming out of COVID.”

The seismic shift toward digital services during the pandemic served as a wakeup call for the insurance industry, which by and large lagged other industries in technology modernization, analysts say.

“In the last few years, the [insurance industry] has taken us in some new directions, being more remote and virtual and changing behaviors than we would have seen in 2019 or before,” Harris-Ferrante says.

And for insurers like MetLife, digital customer-centricity means new approaches to serving agents and policyholders alike — without straying from the heart of the insurance relationship, the human touch.

“In some cases we are b-to-b; in some cases we’re b-to-b-to-c,” Pappas says. “We will digitize mostly the transactional nature of the product, but we do want to safeguard that ability for a person to be there for the customers where that matters the most.”

IT as industry differentiator

Insurers and financial services firms like MassMutual, of Springfield, Mass., are substituting face-to-face meetings with advanced, value-added digital interactions with customers. But the impact of IT in revitalizing what insurance companies offer their customers goes well beyond facilitating video meetings and digitized documentation.

Tara Long, MassMutual’s newly appointed CIO, points to the company’s patented enterprise data application platform and enhanced cybersecurity as integrated digital services that add significant value to its digital customers. For example, digital customers may use biometric login with Touch ID and Face ID for security.

Other key resources that benefit the customer experience include BI and analytics for anything from actuarial pricing to risk selection and customer intelligence, the CIO says.

“There are a lot of self-service capabilities and new digital portals that are going to help service our policyholders as well as our financial advisors,” Long says. “There’s a lot that goes into our digital transformation. It’s a journey with lots of components to it.”

Acrisure, of Grand Rapids, Mich., for instance, uses artificial intelligence to build custom insurance policies and financial services for businesses as well as consumer policies. Matt Marolda, the company’s chief innovation officer who came on board in 2021, has played a key role developing AI models for “custom-tailored” insurance packages, for example.

The COVID wakeup call

For most insurance companies, the global shutdowns that followed COVID-19 were the tipping point.

When the pandemic hit, Aflac CIO Rich Gilbert felt like the firm’s insurance agent business could be a dead duck. Yet Gilbert tapped the company’s Hatch Innovation Lab to build a new virtual enrollment system that had its origin in the data center but was quickly redesigned for the cloud amid the pandemic.

“COVID was the digital disruptor. Our agents sell to small, medium, large businesses at their work site and now there was no work site,” says Gilbert, who signed on as CIO at Aflac in 2019. “So we had to kind of rethink and reimagine our whole model of engaging with policyholders or potential policyholders.”

Aflac’s Virtual Enrollment Experience fully utilized the cloud and SaaS solutions in its construction, Gilbert says.

“We needed the speed of the cloud to assemble a new experience for agents to work remotely. The Virtual Enrollment Experience is fulfilled via a microsite customized for each account and is hosted in the cloud (AWS). Each microsite is composed of several components, including product information and videos to inform, a decision support tool to help decide, a calendaring tool to schedule a virtual consultation with an agent, a virtual collaboration platform via Webex to consult on product offerings, and a connection to enroll and e-sign to complete the process,” he says.

Aflac also expanded its marketing outreach to direct customers to microsites where they can learn about Aflac’s supplemental cancer insurance, set up a virtual meeting with an agent, and use the homegrown system to sign on to policies. “We actually built a whole new enrollment platform that is much like an Amazon capability,” Gilbert says. 

John Hancock is another insurance company that overhauled its operations to be more digital-centric by integrating SaaS services such as Clareto to simplify the insurance purchasing process and reduce underwriting times, while using its homegrown JH eApp to streamline the overall life insurance process.

Building for tomorrow

With new platforms evolving, insurance CIOs are eyeing new possibilities for the future.

Liberty Mutual, which has been an industry leader in digital transformation, operates a hybrid cloud infrastructure built primarily on Amazon Web Services but with specific uses of Microsoft Azure and, lesser so, Google Cloud Platform.

Roughly 60% of Liberty Mutual’s data runs on the cloud and taps into an array of business applications and analytics dashboards that yield real-time insights and predictions, recently-retired CIO James McGlennon told CIO.com last year.

The insurance company under his direction spent 17 years developing a robust platform that today enables consumers to access an automated claims system that uses chatbots, cameras, and e-mail to initiate a claim and rent a car while a machine learning model analyzes the photograph of the damaged vehicle to detect whether its airbag has been deployed, for instance, and to determine immediately whether a vehicle is totaled or the damage is limited to a fender bender.

That’s today. The platform will enable data scientists to build the next generation of applications for its consumers tomorrow.

“We’re really trying to understand the metaverse and what it might mean for us,” said McGlennon. “We’re focused on augmented reality and virtual reality. We’re doing a lot on AI and machine learning and robotics. We’ve already built up blockchain and we’ll continue with all those.”

These new customer digital experiences extend well beyond requiring customers to fill out policy applications digitally or use chatbots for answering basic insurance questions. When designing modern policy applications for digital customers, data scientists at insurers will continue to use the cloud, advanced data tools, business intelligence, and machine learning models that will change the entire business practices — not just the method of communication, insurance CIOs point out.

Digital Transformation, Insurance Industry

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By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In today’s digitalized world, customers value transparency and accessibility above all else. As a result, organizations are taking a proactive approach to provide critical content to end users at the click of a button.

For over 130 years, Hastings Mutual Insurance Company has served and protected its clients throughout the Midwest. The regional insurance agency, with nearly 600 offices and 500 employees, has provided security and peace of mind to customers of all shapes and sizes, from small personal family policies to larger insurance packages that have helped to protect farmers and businesses from the unexpected. With over $1 billion in total assets, the company has grown significantly since its humble beginnings in 1885. Still, Hastings continues to pride itself on its relationships and the care it provides its customers. That is why Hastings Mutual decided to look closely at how it managed and distributed its content to its clients.

Since the early 1980s, the company has used an in-house Policy Administration System (PAS) with what is today Rocket Software’s Mobius Content Services Platform to classify, manage, and grant access along its mainframe to more than 4,000 unique document types. Although current operations were running optimally, Hastings understood that its PAS’s lack of integration with modern technologies would eventually create issues. Hastings management decided on a proactive approach, taking on the challenge of modernizing its existing mainframe operations to an open-source environment to remain competitive in future markets. In its push to modernize, the regional insurance provider also believed updating its client viewing system to provide a more intuitive, user-friendly experience would benefit its customers and employees alike.

The challenges of preserving historical data

While migrating information from the mainframe to open source comes with its own obstacles, Hastings Mutual faced even greater challenges. The company had been developing and storing mission-critical documents and information on its old infrastructure for over three decades — including regulatory, accounting, and workflow documents. Not only would Hastings need to find a way to continue generating these documents throughout the migration process, but it was also essential to maintain the integrity of its historical documents and information during its transfer onto open-source systems. Failure to do so could lead to regulatory sanctions and even legal implications.

With limited resources and a lack of experience with mainframe migration, Hastings realized it needed help to clean up its Logical Partition (LPAR), preserve the integrity of its historical documents, and successfully downsize its mainframe operations — all while maintaining fluid operations.

Finding the right support for mainframe migration

Hastings turned to Rocket Software, whose Professional Services team got to work immediately to assist Hastings’ operational team in the clean-up of its existing LPAR environment. Together, the teams went through each historical document within the LPAR to rename and properly segment it for migration to the correct open-source system. 

Once documents were properly classified and stored within the LPAR ecosystem, Hastings turned its attention to mainframe migration. Hastings was able to modernize its mainframe operations while still utilizing its PAS in conjunction with Mobius Content Services to generate critical documents on its mainframe. After generation, the documents were automatically duplicated and safely transferred to the proper open-source environment. And Hastings was able to begin the migration of its historical documents safely and securely from the mainframe to its open-source systems. 

Improving customer experience

Hastings’ pivot to a more innovative web client has also been essential to the migration’s success and the company’s growing customer satisfaction. Now, end users can access Hastings’ digitized documents with the click of a button — reducing document latency and making high-priority documents available within seconds rather than minutes. And having an intuitive open-source viewing system has empowered Hastings’ end users to find critical information faster and without the hassle of asking for assistance.

The benefits of great partnership

As a result of the project, Hastings Mutual continues to successfully move toward a hybrid open-source infrastructure. The company was able to modernize its operations to produce, store, and distribute documents to its clients faster, more securely, and at a lower cost.

Throughout the migration process, Hastings has not missed a beat. As a regional insurance provider, the ability to continue to provide outstanding service to clients when they need it the most has been pivotal.

As Mainframe experts, Rocket Software helps businesses avoid complications and enhance the management and security of their most critical information. To learn more about our suite of Mobius products, click here.

Digital Transformation

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Insurance or not, many organizations are transforming themselves with agile models. We spoke to a top leader of an international insurance firm that is leveraging Agile approaches more often and in more projects. Here are some learnings we discovered.

What challenges did you need to overcome to be successful?

As we looked to scale Agile across our organization, one of the biggest problems that we experienced was that our tool wasn’t, well, agile. It was little more than a fancy looking spreadsheet and our staff spent their time battling with the tool rather than leveraging the tool to help the business. That just wasn’t sustainable.

In what ways do you address these issues?

Just like any other aspect of business, the ability to deliver work effectively using Agile requires a combination of the right information driving the ability to make sound decisions in a timely manner, and a tool that allows people to focus on doing their work rather than interacting with the tool. We needed to find a solution that could easily integrate with our other enterprise tools, and that could help us become more effective and efficient.

What was your end solution, and what impact did it have?

For us, Rally Software from Broadcom was the answer. We recently ran our first PI planning session using the tool and we cut the duration of the planning session by two hours. Multiply that across the number of people and the number of times we plan PIs and it becomes a material saving. And of course, that efficiency means staff time can be redirected into work that adds value to the business.

Rally integrates with our other tools — delivering information, consuming information, and generally improving workflow and automation. That means people have the information they need in a way that works for them, allowing them to focus on their tasks. We’re also planning to leverage Rally as a decision-making tool for the business — helping teams to prioritize and refine user stories and drive more improvements.

How is this driving your success?

We’re breaking down silos. With the ability to collaborate in a tool that actually helps us deliver, we are strengthening relationships between business and IT. That improves understanding and ultimately drives engagement in ensuring that the best possible solutions are delivered — so we can keep increasing customer and business value.

Conclusion

Through effective implementation of agile solutions such as Rally Software, teams can enhance innovation, optimally balance resources, and fuel dramatic improvements in delivery. Going agile is the first step toward more impactful Value Stream management — so what are you waiting for? If you find yourself in a similar business scenario and would like to learn best practices to unlock excellence with Agile analytics, be sure to download our eBook, “How To Interpret Data from Burnup / Burndown Charts.”

Collaboration Software

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A lot is being written about VSM, and for good reason: it offers the opportunity for organizations to benefit from increased alignment, accelerated innovation, reduced risk, and improved competitive advantage. In spite of the clear benefits, it remains a struggle for many leaders to feel confident in taking initial steps and knowing exactly where to start. In this regard, it is invaluable to hear from experts who have been doing this work and realizing success.

While each organization’s VSM initiative will be unique, there are nevertheless common principles and lessons that all can benefit from. In our work with global enterprises, we’ve had the opportunity to hear directly from the executives who are leading the VSM initiatives in their organizations, and who are leading the industry in terms of maximizing the benefits of VSM. We recently had the opportunity to chat with a leading VSM expert working in a large insurance firm. Several years ago, this executive helped launch the organization’s VSM initiative. Here are some of the key lessons they’ve learned in terms of breaking ground with VSM:

Start with clear definitions

In today’s business world there’s no shortage of acronyms and buzzwords. Ultimately, for the insurer, VSM has come to involve people from throughout the organization, especially when working with an international mix of stakeholders, executives, and participants. It is vital to start with a clear understanding of VSM so everyone’s grounded in a common understanding of what it is and why it’s important.

Clearly define value. The good news is that any organization that’s been in operation has value streams. It is essential to gain a clear, well understood, and agreed upon definition of the value being delivered. Ultimately, if teams aren’t clear on value, it is inherently a hit-or-miss proposition as to whether that value can be delivered and improved over time. The VSM leader took a purposeful approach in this case. Start with value, then look to back up from there in terms of decisions that enable that value, and how it is delivered.

Leverage data to gain transparency

Teams need to be empowered with data. Without a real-time view of what’s happening, it takes longer to pivot, and longer to deliver value. When you have fundamentals in place, decisions become faster, and you’re more likely to avoid having to make the same decisions repeatedly.

Quality data provides context, and helps teams navigate complexity. Teams have to navigate thousands of micro decisions. If we don’t have quality data, those decisions become bigger, more complex efforts; we then have to stop and gain input from others, etc. With quality data, we can validate decisions and move forward.

Are you constantly asking, “What can be done to inform an action?” See where there are disconnects and blockages in value streams. Focus on removing things that get in the way of making decisions, from tactical to roadmaps.

Data-based dashboards versus PowerPoint slides: Ensure your dashboards are based on real data, not interpretation. Automated dashboards are much less manual effort than aggregating data and building slides, and if you have thousands of people doing manual rollups – it really becomes a massive cost and drain on efficiency.

Be inclusive

For this insurance giant, VSM is very much a team sport; to succeed, many people need to be involved and engaged. Any time someone approaches, it is very useful to share knowledge around what the teams are trying to accomplish with VSM. Invariably, when hearing about the focus on delivering customer value, others get engaged and want to be a part of it.

Ultimately, people from legal, finance and executive leadership, and a range of other areas are part of the delivery of value. On a practical level, bringing in these other teams can be instrumental in avoiding potential roadblocks and speeding up initiatives. It is important to listen to different perspectives and be open to changing your mind.

Don’t be neutral

Value streams already exist – the question is how effectively they are being managed. Staying neutral, or not investing in VSM, means competitors will be getting in front of you. Often, if you put off dealing with VSM, problems don’t necessarily emerge right away. They may start emerging in six to eight months. Therefore, it is essential to take a proactive approach, and get started right away. You have to invest in an umbrella before it starts raining, just like you have to invest in systems, processes, and people. Build trust in those investments before you realize you are facing a catastrophe.

Focus

If focus is everywhere, you will be weak everywhere. We all only have a finite amount of time and resources. If your organization is not clearly focused on value, you will be diluting power that exists in an organization. Focusing on everything can be very detrimental. You’ll fall into a trap of focusing on efficiency, while losing sight of what really matters: whether you are gaining traction in value delivery.

Balance continuous improvement and innovation

Continuous improvement is inherently about improving existing processes, while important drivers are very different for innovation. You must be able to accommodate unstructured creativity, experimentation, etc. to foster innovation, without disrupting other workflows. For example, if you have scrum methodology in agile, you are effectively measuring velocity. Ultimately scrum is about stability, and the ability to predict and forecast productivity. You can’t expect to measure on this type of predictability, while at the same time requiring innovation. It creates conflict. If there’s misalignment and you try to scale, you will only scale misalignment. Before you try to scale value, you need to be certain you are delivering value.

Conclusion

VSM makes success far more likely for your organization. By leveraging clear definitions, real-time data, and using an inclusive approach, teams can ensure benefits of VSM are realized – as proven by this real-life example.

For more information, watch this webinar, Resilience Through Rainstorms – How Unum Weathers Any Storm with VSM.

Collaboration Software

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The financial services and insurance industries often claim the title of digital leaders, thanks to their use of technology to create new products and services, and to deliver those offerings in frictionless, seamless ways.

This emphasis on digital transformation was underscored in a recent Gartner study that found that, for the first time ever, technology as a strategic financial services business priority has surpassed growth among CEOs and senior business executives surveyed.

“This dramatic shift signals the extent to which executives view the role of digital, where for many it is now a critical means to an end,” says Jasleen Sindhu, a senior director of research within Gartner’s Financial Services Practice.

While other industries remain on par with the financial sector in terms of their degree of digitalization, the financial services industry shows notable maturity when it comes to digital customer interactions where it “stands out as being better than most other industries,” Sindhu says.

Organizations leading the charge in the financial services and insurance industries exhibit certain characteristics in their approach to IT, helping them to outperform the competition, she says. “These characteristics — composable thinking, business architecture, and composable technologies — … together allow firms to quickly adapt and respond to opportunities and threats.”

Sindhu adds: “The focus for these firms is no longer about ‘having a good digital strategy’ but it is about ‘having a business strategy that creates value and differentiates, enabled by digital.’”

CIO.com recently recognized seven companies in the financial services and insurance space whose use of technology stands out as part of the CIO 100 Awards for IT Innovation and Leadership. Here is a look at their award-winning work.

Aflac virtualizes the customer enrollment experience

Rich Gilbert, chief digital information officer, Aflac

Aflac

Organization: Aflac

Project: Reimagining the Enrollment Experience

IT Leader: Rich Gilbert, chief digital information officer

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Aflac quickly realized its reliance on in-person meetings to sell its products would not work in a world seeking to limit contact. So, it reimagined its business model, tasking teams to develop new digital experiences.

Within months, Aflac IT rolled out new end-to-end digital capabilities that enabled the insurer’s agents to inform, educate, book, and enroll customers on any device from anywhere.

“Without this initiative, the impact of the pandemic could have been much more severe given Aflac’s business model is centered around a face-to-face interaction. Thanks to the hard work of the team, we were able to understand key moments of our agent’s and customer’s journey to reimagine their ‘jobs to be done’ in a new, digitally enabled way. What we learned was that when you involve your end-users in the process, seek to understand rather than respond, and bring everyone to the table without silos, you can deliver great digital products with significant impact,” says Rich Gilbert, chief digital information officer.

Hatch, Aflac’s US innovation lab, took the lead, pulling together leaders and teams to develop and implement a virtual enrollment experience. The teams took a human-centered design approach, engaging in rapid experimentation while validating the proposed solutions. The work resulted in a collection of capabilities that were then distributed across agile teams to advance.

Fully deployed by the end of 2020, those capabilities transformed processes throughout the enrollment lifecycle. For example, agents who once relied on physical materials such as product brochures gained tools to generate on-brand, compliance-approved sites at scale in minutes. Customers gained personalized sites where they can view their specific product offerings, watch informational videos, view dates for enrollment, and book time directly with their agent.

Additionally, Hatch accelerated a new AI-driven decision support tool that recommends products to customers based on past purchases by customers with similar profiles. The team also enabled digital enrollment with features such as e-signature.

To deliver these capabilities, Hatch worked with the other teams to overcome multiple challenges, such as integrating legacy systems, ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, and contending with resource fluctuations as a result of COVID.

Ally optimizes customer savings experience

Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data, and digital officer, Ally Financial

Ally Financial

Organization: Ally Financial

Project: Smart Savings: Bucket Goals

IT Leader: Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data, and digital officer

Ally Financial set out to create a suite of financial tools to help its customers overcome their struggles to save money. Ally’s Smart Savings Tools, first launched in February 2020, help customers maximize savings while minimizing the time and effort required to do so.

One tool within the suite, Bucket Goals, enables customers to set funding and timeframe targets for their savings goals, and to monitor their progress, providing features to help them, such as customized prompts and automated savings.

Ally’s design approach started with TM Studio, its concept testing and innovation team. The team engaged consumers, asking about their savings objectives and challenges, and then used that information to identify savings obstacles as well as ways to overcome them.

Meanwhile, using human-centric design principles, its consumer research and usability teams worked with engineering to understand and implement the right customer experience.

Ally built the front-end UI with React and chose Ember to power a dynamic digital experience. The tool is API-driven and uses real-time transactional data to enable a personalized experience. It also uses native mobile languages Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android) to optimize mobile app performance.

Customers who have used Ally’s Smart Savings Tools have saved twice as much as those who haven’t, according to Ally data, which also shows that more than 2 million “bucket goals” have been created.

“In many ways this project was a springboard for Ally,” says Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data, and digital officer. “We created a unique digital experience framework and model — a combo of human-centered design thinking, digital-native experience development, and scalable technologies — that allows us to quickly identify consumer pain points and develop and refine solutions. This listen-first and design-second approach enables us to fully leverage our unique hybrid persona of fintech and established financial institution and create a transformational experience for the consumer.”

City National Bank invests in data-driven customer relationships

Organization: City National Bank of Florida

Project: Innovative Data Grouping Approach to Optimize Customer Relationship Value

IT Leader: Ariel Carrion, CIO

At City National Bank (CNB), customer relationship management needed an overhaul. The bank’s customers were assigned relationship managers based on their accounts’ point of entry or branch origin. As a result, large net-worth customers did not always get paired with the most suitable relationship manager, and customers with multiple accounts were assigned numerous relationship managers to help serve their needs.

To optimize service, balance resource workloads, and maximize revenue, CNB wanted to group customer household and organizational relationships, identify high-value relationships, and more effectively assign relationship managers best suited to develop and grow those accounts. To do so, the bank set out to implement a data-grouping solution to handle the complexities of accounts without negatively impacting customers. Partnering with consulting firm Protiviti, CNB implement a graph data structure and developed algorithms to uncover nested customer relationships, gauge the size of each banking relationship, and optimize resource assignment.

As part of this project, the technology team established consistent logic rules for account linkages; defined new policies and processes to assign relationship managers; and continuously refined the criteria based on new insights gleaned from the advanced analytics. It also implemented a distributed data platform (Databricks) on Azure to process enormous amounts of customer data on a daily basis.

The technology facilitated data-based decisions for resource assignment, thereby improving and simplifying CNB’s relationship creation and maintenance process. It also enabled CNB to measure the size of each banking relationship, automate nearly all client relationship assignments, and drive other improvements in its customer relationship function.

Global Payments automates code security scanning

Organization: Global Payments

Project: Macroscope

IT Leader: Guido Sacchi, executive vice president and CIO

Global Payments sought to create a more efficient, scalable process for securing the code it developed, while doing more to cut application security risk. So, the application security team developed Macroscope, an automated code scanning tool.

Macroscope scans all code in all repositories, including all branches. It can scan many different programming languages, code at check-in, and infrastructure as code. It also features centralized vulnerability management, email notifications for new findings, vulnerability aging reports, false positive tracking, and remediation metrics.

Prior to Macroscope, Global Payments application teams had to manually request scans, which were conducted independently, a process that yielded multiple reports that were not reconciled for false positives and duplicate results, leaving developers to shift through them. The volume of scan requests annually resulted in thousands of reports, which application teams then had to review. Moreover, teams usually requested scans late in the development process, with the remediation process making it difficult for development teams to keep on track with their release schedules.

Now with Macroscope, application security is better integrated into the software development lifecycle, including Global Payments’ continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Macroscope also reduces friction in finding security vulnerabilities by enabling developers to fix these vulnerabilities during their normal software development lifecycle (SDLC) process. The project has also delivered other business benefits, such as reducing the time developers spend fixing security vulnerabilities in code and improving speed to market.

Hastings Mutual turns to data to tame weather impacts on policies

Eshwar Pastapur, vice president and CIO, Hastings Mutual Insurance Co.

Hastings Mutual Insurance Co.

Organization: Hastings Mutual Insurance Co.

Project: Geospatial Intelligence

IT Leader: Eshwar Pastapur, vice president and CIO

The CIO and senior vice president of operations at Hastings Mutual Insurance had a very specific objective: To use the company’s data visualization tools to provide weather-related policy exposures. This would bring in-house and improve a function the company was getting as a fee-based service, with information provided only monthly via spreadsheet.

Developing such capabilities would enable Hastings Mutual to more accurately predict the number of claims in each of its coverage areas. It would also help forecast the necessary claim support levels and improve fraud detection and the accuracy of loss reporting.

The project relies on open-source weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Iowa State University, overlaying company policies and delivering greater claim predictability through the ability to drill down at the policy level.

To deliver high-performance rendering of data, the team used single-page applications (SPAs) on the front end. This not only allows for easy delivery of information via web browsers but also helps with performance as pages are rendered directly on client devices. The team also used elastic techniques to expedite searching through large amounts of business data.

Geographic information is provided using PostGIS, a relational database server optimized for geocoded data. Sisense business intelligence software provides the interface to present the resulting screens and support user interaction. The resulting tool, with self-service visualization and analytics, allows for quick access and easy manipulation of the data by users. Moreover, it enables Hastings Mutual to add more capabilities in the future, such as incorporating AI for underwriting decision-making.

Implemented in under six months and fully deployed in 2021, the in-house geospatial solution already has reduced claim-related and other costs and improved relevancy and timely decision-making.

“This started as an expense-saving project, but now it has become a powerful competitive advantage for us,” says Vice President and CIO Eshwar Pastapur, explaining that IT has and can continue to layer more capabilities to the tool as business needs arise.

TIAA modernizes with microservices

Ajit Naidu, CIO of retirement, marketing & digital client technology, TIAA

TIAA

Organization: TIAA

Project: Remittance Modernization

IT Leader: Ajit Naidu, CIO of retirement, marketing, and digital client technology

As TIAA’s client base and demand for services grew, its remittance system wasn’t keeping up, resulting in a scaling issue that impacted customers and left TIAA developers propping up the technology to ensure the company adhered to its contractual service-level agreements.

The company’s concerns over such issues gave rise to the Remittance Platform Modernization project, which was launched to develop an application that performed 100 times better with increased stability and scalability, as well as support for accelerated feature delivery, a seamless client experience, and a vastly improved user interface.

TIAA used domain-driven design to develop the solution and associated services, establishing an internal community-managed framework for building microservices, which are the core of TIAA’s new platform architecture. The company also deployed a container-first operating model that delivers all applications and services within a containerized environment for scalability and flexibility.

“The Remittance modernization effort was the refactoring and re-engineering of a complex, monolithic and legacy platform,” says Ajit Naidu, CIO of retirement, marketing, and digital client technology. “This involved creating a component- and services-based architecture enabling the dynamic assembly of solutions and automated hierarchical unit testing. All the services created are built on a framework that optimizes distributed processing of data and files with caching capabilities. Also implemented the capability to replay/unwind transactions to easily fix data and/or processing errors.”

The results: a 220% improvement in system performance and a 72% reduction in data movement resulting in significant reduction in failure points, with 98% testing now automated.

“In addition, this led to more than 60% reduction in time to market with over 70% reduction in operational costs,” Naidu adds.

Zenus Bank goes mobile for global business model

Pedro Martinez, CIO, Zenus Bank

Zenus Bank

Organization: Zenus Bank

Project: Zenus Bank app

IT Leader: Pedro Martinez, CIO

Zenus, a newly chartered digital bank with a global business model, is offering individuals and businesses around the world the ability to open a US bank account without having to be a US citizen or resident. It offers that capability through its native iOS and Android apps.

But developing the Zenus app presented multiple unique challenges for the new bank. Teams had to ensure the app meets all regulatory requirements while also performing to technological standards to ensure a user-friendly omnichannel banking experience to clients all over the world. They also had to successfully onboard vendors to take on their subset of the project and manage complex process integrations.

“The US banking industry has many regulatory and licensing obligations. To ensure that we met all of them, we needed to have an IT infrastructure that was secure, stable, and fast. We also wanted to take a modular approach to banking, which requires many integrations. We found it essential to be working alongside software and implementation partners who are customer-centric, adhere to the latest standards, and can picture one unified front and backend platform,” says CIO Pedro Martinez. “Through our partnerships, with the likes of Microsoft, we’re achieving operational excellence, so our end users have a positive banking experience.”

Using agile methodologies, developers created a patent-pending omnichannel remote onboarding process and a patent-pending proprietary customer risk score. It also delivers real-time cloud-hosted fraud management on all channels.

The technology has fueled the bank’s business objectives, enabling Zenus to achieve cross-border American Visa card issuance and giving Zenus the ability to offer instant and unlimited cross-border USD transfers. To date, approximately 80% of international applicants automatically are approved by the bank’s patent-pending banking system in less than 10 minutes.

The Zenus App is live in Apple and Google Play stores in more than 180 countries.

CIO 100, Financial Services Industry, Insurance Industry