(Image source: Old Mutual homepage.)

Old Mutual Limited (Johannesburg), Africa’s largest and oldest financial services group, has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS, Seattle) as its preferred cloud provider and will migrate its digital customer platforms, core insurance applications, and product administration systems to the cloud, according to the vendor. Old Mutual will work with AWS’s professional services organization, to migrate over 1,000 applications to AWS, shutting down its data centers by early 2022. The adoption of AWS functionality, performance, global infrastructure, and security will help Old Mutual modernize its technology infrastructure, rapidly innovate, and enhance the insurance and banking experience for customers, while also improving intermediary and employee interactions, the vendor asserts.

Old Mutual is integrating AWS’s analytics and machine learning (ML) services into its business processes to drive greater insights to help the company build more personalized customer facing applications and experiences, the vendor reports. The insurer is building a data lake on AWS, called the Information Fabric, which AWS says will provide a single, consistent view of a customer’s information across the entire business.

Historically, Old Mutual customers faced challenges accessing their financial portfolio because their information was distributed across multiple data sources, according to AWS. Using Information Fabric, the insurer is in the process of refining its MyOldMutual customer portal, giving customers a view of their entire financial portfolio in one place at any time. Using Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, Old Mutual has developed a chatbot for its website that provides instant responses to customers, through the customer’s preferred channel, be that voice, email, web, or text, 24 hours a day.

Old Mutual is also pursuing other AWS ML technologies, including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, and Amazon Personalize, a real-time personalization and recommendation service, to develop new real-time financial services, including automated, self-service investment options for customers to make informed decisions when planning and saving for their financial goals.

Depth and Breadth of Services Needed to Innovate Like a Startup

“AWS provides us with the depth and breadth of services we need to innovate like a startup, with the security expected from Africa’s oldest and most trusted financial services company,” comments Johnson Idesoh, CIO, Old Mutual. “With AWS, we can rapidly experiment at lower costs and push the successful experiments into production faster, allowing us to improve the experience for existing customers and attract new ones. AWS understands this high level of customer focus, which is why we see them as far more than just a technology supplier. We are working closely with AWS to not only serve our customers, but also support the development of technology skills in Africa by offering ongoing cloud training programs for employees.”

“Financial services organizations are turning to AWS because we offer them the broadest capabilities, best performance, and highest levels of security,” comments Andy Isherwood, VP and Managing Director EMEA, Amazon Web Services. “For nearly two centuries, Old Mutual has been trusted by people across Africa. By moving off rigid, legacy technologies to flexible and scalable cloud technologies on AWS, Old Mutual will continue to maintain trust and delight their customers by offering more personalized services.”

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