Old Mutual to move to the cloud with Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services said on Wednesday that Old Mutual has struck a wide-ranging deal with the South African financial services group to shift a large portion of its IT workload to the cloud.

Old Mutual has selected AWS as its “preferred cloud provider” and will migrate its digital customer platforms, core insurance applications and product administration systems onto the platform.

It will migrate over a thousand applications to AWS, shutting down its data centres by early 2022, AWS said in a statement.

AWS and rival Microsoft are in a race to capture corporate cloud computing clients in South Africa. Microsoft opened two Azure data centres in South Africa earlier this year, one in Johannesburg and the other in Cape Town, while AWS has said it will open a facility in Cape Town next year. The value of the AWS deal with Old Mutual has not been disclosed.

“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 personalised customer-facing applications and experiences,” AWS said.

“Old Mutual is building a ‘data lake’ on AWS, called the Information Fabric, which will provide a single, consistent view of a customer’s information across the entire business.”

Challenging

Historically, it was challenging for customers to access their financial portfolio because their information was distributed across multiple data sources. Using Information Fabric, Old Mutual is in the process of refining its MyOldMutual customer portal, giving customers a view of their entire financial portfolio in one place.

“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 — voice, e-mail, 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 personalisation 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.”

The financial services group’s chief information officer, Johnson Idesoh, said: the agreement with AWS will mean it can “rapidly experiment at lower cost and push the successful experiments into production faster, allowing us to improve the experience for existing customers and attract new ones”.  — © 2019 NewsCentral Media