Suncorp is modernising its finance and HR systems
Suncorp will move its internal finance system off Oracle E-Business Suite to the cloud-based Oracle Fusion in May as part of a broader platform modernisation effort underway at the insurance group.
Suncorp’s Tom Richardson.
Executive general manager of bank transition and corporate technology Tom Richardson told a recent Oracle event in Sydney that Suncorp will also re-platform its HR systems to run on Oracle.
Suncorp outlined mid-last year two key priorities driving its technology investments over the next three years: platform modernisation and AI enablement.
The AI work broadly fits under an agreement with Microsoft, which was renewed at the end of last year.
Platform modernisation, meanwhile, has largely been dominated by Suncorp’s move to transition its core insurance policy system to one made by Duck Creek Technologies.
However, Richardson’s comments show that modernisation is touching all parts of insurance and head office.
“We’re replatforming all of the five major insurance functions – policy, claims, marketing, contact centre, and my area of corporate,” he said.
In the corporate head office, the finance system modernisation is switching between Oracle systems.
“The finance platform is the old E-Business platform, so we’re moving across from that,” Richardson said.
“We’ll be fully onboarded to Oracle Fusion for finance in May this year.
“It was a really easy decision around [platform replacement for] finance. We knew the product, [and] we knew Fusion was essentially the next iteration.”
Oracle is, however, a new introduction to underpin Suncorp’s HR function.
Richardson said the transition to Oracle for HR is expected to be completed “in March next year”.
The insurer has partnered with Deloitte on the HR element, and has also engaged Oracle Consulting Services for some unspecified “other pieces of engineering work … to assist us while we’re building up our own capability.”
“So every piece of the Oracle family is coming into play at Suncorp,” he said.
Richardson said that Oracle had been judged to “fit the size of our organisation and [our] aspirations that we had to fundamentally change the experience of our staff” from a HR perspective.
A mark of maturity
Richardson described the two focus areas of platform modernisation and AI enablement as “not … technology strategy” but as “fundamental assumptions that underpin our business strategy”.
Neither are new to Suncorp, with the company anticipating its relative maturity will aid its success.
“The next two years are about execution for us,” Richardson said.
“We’re not in experimentation with AI, and we’re not in experimentation with platform modernisation.
“It’s a really substantial program of work, and it’s about us executing on that program of work to put the foundations in place for the new platforms, build out those obvious AI use cases, and [then] come up for a breath of fresh air.
In particular, he said: “There will be no limit on the number of new use cases that we have for that AI capability.”
Richardson said that Suncorp viewed AI both as “part of the insurance framework” and as a transformative influence on the sector more broadly.
“There’s probably three reasons why – data, digital and people,” he said.
“On the data front, insurance has always been a data business. Historically, that’s around actuarial and risk management, but risk management now looks like real-time telemetry streams from vehicles, real-time weather monitoring and climate change prediction. That’s all open to transformation through AI.
“On the digital front, we do about 80 percent of our origination and servicing digitally, and AI is just about making that experience better for customers. We’re at about 2 million AI-enabled conversations with customers a year, and that’s just doubling every six months or so.
“I think the real transformer, though, is in that ‘people’ space. At its heart, insurance is a people business. We have an enormous privilege of meeting our customers in their hardest, most difficult time: when the house is flooded, they’ve crashed their car, they can’t work, their business is not operational and they’re trying to recover.
“Most of our customers say at some point, if not all the way through that claims process, they want to interact with a human. So our AI journey there is about maximising the time in which we can have staff talking to customers.”
Richardson said that so far, this has taken the form of a claims summarisation capability that can “take between five and 30 minutes of preparation time out of customer interactions for complex cases.”
“Case managers are spending that time directly interacting with customers,” he said.
He also said that AI could reduce hold times and direct customers in urgent need of assistance to human agents faster.
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