(Image source: Old Mutual homepage.)
Old Mutual Limited (Johannesburg), Africa’s largest and oldest financial services group, has closed its on-premises data centers and migrated its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure, including its banking, insurance, and wealth management systems, to AWS (Seattle), according to a statement from the vendor. AWS characterizes the migration as representing a significant step in Old Mutual’s digital transformation. Old Mutual is using AWS’s infrastructure to decrease financial transaction processing time by two-thirds, reduce downtime by 50 percent, streamline the development of new and more relevant insurance products, and drive innovation across its business with machine learning (ML), the AWS statement says. Old Mutual selected AWS in 2019 and launched its migration project.
May Govender, acting chief information officer for Old Mutual Limited.
The vendor reports that the full migration to AWS involved moving more than 2,000 on-premises servers, 215 applications, 1,786 databases, and more than 500 websites. “The move will accelerate innovation, at a time of global economic uncertainty, by reducing the time required for new application testing from months to minutes,” AWS says.
With its cloud migration complete, Old Mutual will use AWS capabilities to better anticipate customer needs and develop the next generation of financial products and experiences, according to the vendor. 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, personalized financial forecasting and recommendations for customers, AWS says. The vendor provides examples of benefits, including 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 personalization 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 individualized 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, AWS reports.
Old Mutual is also incorporating AWS training into management courses to help senior managers and leaders across the business to adopt a cloud-first mindset and product development strategy. Since 2019, 50 percent of the financial group’s business and technical leaders have earned at least one AWS Certification. Cloud-first thinking is informing Old Mutual’s expansion strategy across the 14 countries its pan-African operations serve. The carrier’s 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, AWS says.
Backbone of Reliable Service
Chris Erasmus, Country Manager, AWS.
“Daily server outages. Disconnected financial products. Ballooning on-premises costs. Those are all challenges we leave behind as we go all-in on AWS,” comments May Govender, acting chief information officer for Old Mutual Limited. “Our AWS digital infrastructure has become the backbone of reliable service—a launchpad for future growth. AWS is helping us imagine new possibilities at every level, providing us with a suite of innovative services like generative AI that will spur new customer experiences that can differentiate Old Mutual in the future.”
“The completion of Old Mutual’s all-in migration to AWS represents the next chapter of their digital transformation, and we’re excited to help them harness their momentum in the cloud to unlock new innovations,” comments Chris Erasmus, country manager, AWS. “Old Mutual is using our leading infrastructure to increase performance, reduce processing times, streamline operations, simplify customer experiences, and reduce costs. AWS will continue to collaborate with Old Mutual as they deliver the next generation of financial products.”
Old Mutual Limited Selects AWS as its Preferred Cloud Provider