Global insurer boosts innovation, simplifies operations and improves employee experience

To compete against new, agile players, this global insurance company—which had built leading property and casualty (P&C) and life insurance businesses in Europe, North America and Asia—needed to drive innovation in products, operations and workplace services.

A new IT strategy for insurance  

Competition in the insurance industry is fierce, with new competitors constantly trying to chip away market share from large established companies.

This Europe-based global insurer with worldwide operations was facing traditional competitors as well as smaller upstarts with agile business models built around the latest fintech technologies.

To compete in the world of digital insurance, the global insurer knew that it had to focus on delivering innovative products at a competitive cost. However, the company relied heavily on 20-year-old applications running on costly mainframe infrastructure.

The company needed to simplify operations and unify its workplace to respond to business needs faster, more efficiently and securely.

At the heart of the company’s strategy was its 15-year IT and applications support relationship with DXC Technology. 

Working with DXC, the insurer is now advancing along the path to cloud-based services, modern applications and advanced automation of its large technology estate, which includes over 500 applications, 8,300 servers and 33 petabytes of storage, and 100,000 email accounts.

“The breakthrough for us in the last couple of years has been really appreciating the need to innovate within the overall structure of our contract with DXC,” says the company’s head of service delivery and integration. 

“We need to straddle the cloud and some very traditional elements, such as the mainframe, which is still very important to us. With DXC, we really have a partner that helps us straddle both the traditional and the innovative, rather than seeking those things from different vendors.”

The close partnership began in 2004, when DXC began providing application outsourcing services for the company’s core insurance software. Since then, DXC’s support has expanded to include IT outsourcing, private cloud, Modern Workplace, security services and more.

All of these services are designed to support the company’s key business goals of simplification, customer centricity and innovation to compete more effectively in digital insurance markets around the globe.

Simplifying IT and operations

The company’s simplification program is aimed at streamlining the integration of the company’s global business environment, reducing manual effort and cutting IT operating costs by 30 percent — savings that can be reinvested in modernisation. Key projects include:

• Consolidation and modernisation of applications, including ongoing support for DXC Insurance Software for policy administration, product building and sales compensation, as well as integration with third-party insurance processing software. One high-profile project included the modernisation of a core P&C insurance processing system with Guidewire software and integration with the company’s online fast-quote feature, used by millions of potential customers. By recoding the fast-quote application and optimising the page, DXC managed to improve online rating performance by 20 percent, ensuring a faster response to online sales queries.
• Introduction of robotic process automation (RPA), provided by DXC as a cloud-based RPA as a Service. DXC and the insurer have pushed nearly 550 bots into production, serving six of the insurer’s business units and automating processes in more than 400 applications. By eliminating manual effort, RPA has helped increase staff time for customer-facing work by up to 70 percent. The goal is to reduce processing time by 80 percent, from as much as 40 hours a month to as little as 3 hours. The program has so far saved nearly $2 million annually based on the reduced manual effort. 
• Hyper-automation of IT service management to proactively detect IT issues and resolve them faster using DXC Platform X™, DXC’s data-driven intelligent automation platform with resilient, self-healing capabilities. The system integrates ServiceNow and 11 open source and proprietary solutions to auto-detect symptoms of potential incidents; auto-resolve to increase capacity for fixing problems and fulfilling service requests; auto-improve to continuously improve application health, and auto-manage to focus on new approaches to process automation. To date, DXC Platform X has eliminated nearly 25,000 service request tickets and reduced manual effort by 139,000 hours. IT incidents were down 48 percent in the first year, and the mean time to resolution fell by 30 percent.
• Migration from data centre to private cloud, revolutionising the way the company consumes infrastructure services, with more security and flexibility than public cloud. From a single, unified storefront, project teams can now order all services for spinning up a private cloud — including procurement, governance and security. A process that used to take weeks for ordering new servers now takes 48 hours or less.

“I like to see the right workload in the right place at the right price, and that’s what DXC delivers through its Cloud Right™ approach,” the insurance executive adds.

At the same time, DXC is also supporting a global program to accelerate modernisation and improve delivery and transparency of infrastructure services.

Under the program, DXC has migrated more than 2,200 workloads, and 1.6 petabytes of storage data and 10 petabytes of legacy tape data to private cloud. Sixty-two critical applications are running with an advanced monitoring as a service to ensure maximum reliability and resilency.

“The program is a game changer to move us to the hybrid cloud and modernise our infrastructure service, while reducing our costs,” says the company’s chief IT services officer. “The DXC team has done a fabulous job of delivering within budget and on time with no business interruption.”

Focusing on customer centricity

Another key initiative is focused on enhancing employee satisfaction and increasing productivity for more than 50,000 employees by rolling out unified Modern Workplace technologies. DXC and the company’s solution architects collaborated on a global environment that includes a standard operating environment built on the latest Microsoft operating system and a central service catalog that enables self-service ordering and automated delivery of more than 120 applications.

DXC replaced existing legacy on-premises Notes Domino and Exchange solutions with modern O365 cloud service for email, messaging, conferencing and document creation and sharing. A global Tier-1 service desk provides more reliable service and modern telephony systems, improved self-service capabilities including chat, online ticket logging and an integrated service catalog for service requests, and zero-touch device provisioning for home-based workers. New support options including modern drop-in centres, smart building solutions and IT vending machines.

“Together we have transformed more than 30,000 devices to a new modern global platform with a seamless, contextualised user experience,” says the company’s head of Windows 10 migration. “Our new digital workplace has proven very valuable, especially during the COVID-19 crisis.”

The new workplace increases security with biometric authentication and encryption of devices using standard toolsets, enabling the company to centrally manage and report on the status of devices and compliance with security policies. Savings from the streamlined services improved the profitability of the business and has enabled the IT organisation to become more proactive in eliminating service issues.

Driving innovation

The company recognises that innovation is crucial to its success in competing with new players in the market. Two key areas of innovation are increasing speed to market for applications and creating a more secure environment: First, the company is aiming for a more agile DevSecOps environment with new ways of working across cloud; and, second, mainframe platforms to accelerate the development of new products and services and reduce time to market, lowering development costs by up to 15 percent.

The company now automates application development processes and uses DXC Testing as a Service to build quality into applications, identify defects earlier, reduce rework and accelerate product introduction. The insurer’s testing automation program, which resulted in savings of 63 percent, was recognised by the European Software Testing Awards with finalist awards for Testing Team of the Year and Test Manager of the Year. Other key accomplishments include:

• E-Scooter insurance. To support the massive proliferation of small electric vehicles in Europe, or e-scooters, DXC helped roll out new software to manage liability and comprehensive insurance contracts for e-scooters. The insurer to became one of the few companies offering insurance for people riding e-scooters.
• Innovation program. DXC and the insurer jointly foster innovation by soliciting suggestions and ideas from the company’s employees, judging them for applicability, and then paying cash prizes to the winners. In the first year alone, approximately 330 ideas were submitted. Of those, nearly 50 were implemented, including automatic backup monitoring, mainframe DevSecOps and application modernisation — saving an estimated $1.46 million.
• Email security as a service. With phishing and ransomware attacks a growing problem, DXC helped the insurer replace legacy security tools with  Proofpoint solutions that include encryption and threat auto protection capabilities. The migration was executed swiftly and seamlessly, with zero escalations.
• Vulnerability management. Addressing security vulnerabilities across the company’s environment is a constant challenge, typically requiring manual patching of systems. DXC improved the deployment of security patches across all DXC managed systems to meet mutually established patching scope and remediated missed patches through automation. To date, increased automation combined with data standardisation, data recollection and data analysis, has helped reduce the number of vulnerabilities by 5 times globally and by 8 times across all ISPs.