How an investment in IT was part of Beneva's consolidation strategy

How an investment in IT was part of Beneva’s consolidation strategy | Insurance Business Canada

Technology

How an investment in IT was part of Beneva’s consolidation strategy

Cloud migration was the way to go

Technology

By
David Saric

When Beneva was formed from its consolidation of La Capitale and SSQ Insurance in 2020, the company wanted to use a significant IT investment to streamline its operational functions while also giving it a competitive edge in the insurance market.

“With the profit we make, we reinvest. That’s very positive for us because it allows us to invest a lot of money each year into other things, and because of that we have decided to go forward with the cloud,” said Eric Marcoux (pictured), the company’s IT vice-president of property & casualty and corporate services.

He outlined how Amazon’s approach to creating a holistic customer experience was a big motivation to deliver a digitally augmented consumer experience.

Now, by focusing on cloud-based solutions in partnership with Guidewire, new updates and services can happen at a much faster pace that suits consumer expectations.

“In the past, IT deliveries took 12-to-16 months before they went live,” Marcoux said.

“Now, the idea is to deliver a bunch of new features once per month to our customer portal online, as well as our mobile app. We want to be able to offer one digital solution to our customers, especially if they have multiple forms of coverage from us, from P&C to group insurance.”

In an interview with Insurance Business, Marcoux spoke about some of the challenges that Beneva faced and opportunities it explored when trying to migrate to the cloud during its consolidation.

Some hurdles when making the switch to a cloud-based system

While migrating to the cloud was an extremely important business and IT objective when Beneva was formed, there were certainly some hurdles to overcome when doing so.

“Before the merge, both La Capitale and SSQ had their own investments in IT,” Marcoux said.

“We could not do everything at the same time and transition to the cloud — we had to do it chunk by chunk. It’s been a very major IT investment that neither company had ever done before.

“The merge gave us an opportunity to change the business processes from both La Capitale and SSQ because we were not working the same way.”

This process of consolidation and regeneration allowed Beneva to build a clean slate and reassess new business opportunities.

Switching to a Guidewire-backed SaaS system has also allowed Beneva to automate parts of the insurance experience, including using autopilot for claims submissions, in a more seamless way.

“It’s easier for us to do digital with P&C than it was before,” the VP said.

“To develop and implement these kinds of features in the past we would have taken close to 1,000 days. But now to deploy to autopilot all we have to do is switch on its configuration and that’s it. That’s what we’re looking for in our strategy.”

Furthermore, migrating to the cloud and having it handled by a third-party tech company has also changed the company’s approach to cybersecurity.

“In the past, we had to do updates on the database, we had to manage our passwords and the updates on our libraries, while also having to be sure that we went with the latest version of the database, software and so on,” Marcoux said.

“We also experienced a very important security issue right after we announced our merging in 2020 where we had to shut down everything for a month and a half. I don’t want that to happen anymore.”

In response, the team at Beneva made sure that there were certain stipulations in its contract with Guidewire that drew specific attention to the security of its data, who can have access to the data and how it is managed, and whether it is shared with other carriers.

“We needed to be very careful when we do development environments not to copy production data where there may be personal information,” Marcoux added.

“While we may never feel 100% secure, you always have to invest, we feel much more secure now than we ever have.”