(Image credit: Shutterstock.)
Nationwide (Columbus, Ohio) is expanding its relationship with AWS, making the Amazon.com, Inc. company (Seattle), its preferred cloud provider, according an AWS statement. As part of a company-wide digital transformation, Nationwide is moving key, business critical workloads to AWS, including more than 850 business and customer-facing applications, such as claims, personal and commercial insurance policy admin systems, and the company’s flagship website Nationwide.com, the statement says. AWS says Nationwide will use a wide array of its advanced services, including analytics, database, machine learning, security, and serverless technologies, which will give the insurance and financial services company the ability to deliver deeper insights to its independent agents, financial professionals, and customer service associates to provide more personalized recommendations and customer service to their millions of customers.
Jim Fowler, EVP, CTO, Nationwide.
AWS says that it is accelerating Nationwide’s move to the cloud through AWS Enterprise Next, a program that pairs AWS experts with customer teams to create a long-term plan and key milestones to drive a company’s ongoing digital transformation. In the case of Nationwide, AWS experts and partners are working with Nationwide over a 15-month engagement program to create an on-site, cross-functional team to modernize Nationwide’s applications, IT environment, and operating practices.
The vendor reports that AWS Enterprise Next has already helped Nationwide build more than 60 applications in the cloud, including its Nationwide Small Business Advisory platform, an online experience that uses machine learning services like Amazon Textract (a machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents) to pull data from scanned forms and documents to automate the underwriting process for small business owners. The platform also uses AWS’s machine learning-driven personalization service, Amazon Personalize, to tailor personalized insurance policy recommendations to small business customers in minutes.
Leveraging AWS gives Nationwide the ability to introduce new resources like enhanced mobile applications and self-service financial planning, to customers much faster, getting these new ideas into the hands of customers in days, as opposed to the months it took previously, the vendor asserts. AWS analytics is also helping to reveal new insights related to application usage patterns, business trends, and customer preferences, allowing Nationwide to empower independent agents and financial professionals to make better, more personalized recommendations to customers based on the financial and insurance resources available, according to AWS.
Nationwide will also use Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s service for easily building, training, and deploying machine learning models quickly at scale, to help its data scientists enhance their performance in areas such as marketing analytics and risk assessment to accelerate the company’s life insurance policy processing, the vendor says.
Greg Pearson, VP, Worldwide Commercial Sales, AWS.
“Our customers’ needs and expectations of how their insurance partner supports them are evolving rapidly and AWS has given us the agility that we need to quickly innovate and provide new services, while delivering the security, reliability, and performance that customers have come to expect from us for more than 90 years,” comments Jim Fowler, CTO, Nationwide. “AWS has helped us move to the cloud quicker than we ever imagined possible, and their unmatched portfolio of services is transforming our business. AWS gives us the ability to reach new digital audiences who can access and consume our services through a variety of channels, and empowers our associates with next-generation tools and insights to enhance our customer service.”
‘Unmatched’ Portfolio of Services
“Combining Nationwide’s financial expertise with AWS’s proven performance and unmatched portfolio of services is enabling them to deliver powerful new financial tools to help them stay ahead competitively and remain a leader in serving customers,” says Greg Pearson, VP, Worldwide Commercial Sales, AWS. “Leveraging AWS, Nationwide can innovate and deploy new solutions while they are streamlining their business operations and processes on the backend. By building and running their most strategic platforms on AWS, Nationwide is positioning itself as a leading choice for life insurance and financial services for years to come.”