(SiliconAngle) - As the dust of rapid adaptation starts to settle, companies are looking at their digital infrastructure and seeing new possibilities. But their potential can be restricted by older technology and entrenched operations.
“I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it,” said Nick Volpe (pictured, right), chief information officer of individual markets and head of enterprise customer technology at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. “Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends.”
To fix that problem, the company recently worked with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Accenture PLC.
Volpe and Kym Gully (pictured, left), managing director of technology at Accenture, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. They discussed how Accenture’s Life Insurance and Annuity Platform (or ALIP) on AWS enables Guardian Life to modernize its business operations. (* Disclosure below.)
COVID forces Guardian Life to create virtual in-person testing
Like companies across almost all industries, Guardian Life was forced to go virtual as COVID shut down in-person testing for life and health insurance policies. Fortunately, the company had already moved its production load to the AWS cloud, and so was able to pivot quicker than most of its competitors.
But the company’s new business department still relied heavily on in-person testing for the client approval process. “We had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adapt the application, and adapt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels,” said Volpe.
The changes happened fast, and soon new clients were able to get certified remotely. “We moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board,” Volpe stated.
The success made Guardian Life take a broader view for its cloud strategy. “We realized our current systems for policy admin were not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud,” Volpe said. “We started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift-and-shift.”
Decades of product innovation in just one year
Looking for partners to help the company up its cloud game, Guardian Life found Accenture, AWS and ALIP.
“Our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers married really well with the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform,” Volpe said.
In addition, Accenture’s ability to provide low-code configuration versus development aligned with Guardian’s need for flexible, fast time to market.
Security was also a major consideration for Guardian, which Gully described as “very strict, very responsible” and a “market leader” in its approach. Balancing the need to protect customer data while taking advantage of business insights that data can bring is tough. But together, Accenture and Guardian planned out an approach that maximized security while progressing the business, according to Gully.
It’s almost a year since Guardian first partnered with Accenture, and the company is already due to launch its first product configuration into ALIP.
“Within a year, we’ve taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud,” Volpe stated. “By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can.”
BY BETSY AMY-VOGT
NOVEMBER 30 2021
