Suncorp is assembling a program team ahead of deploying a new insurance policy technology platform in Australia.
The insurer announced last year it had selected US firm Duck Creek Technologies as its new policy and billing systems provider as part of a three-year “AI-enabled operational transformation”.
During Suncorp’s half-year results for FY25, it was revealed that the Duck Creek platform is currently being tested at Suncorp’s joint venture company, AA Insurance in New Zealand.
Giving an update on the project’s status, Suncorp consumer insurance CEO Lisa Harrison said the AA Insurance platform is now “code complete”.
“We’re in the testing phase and we’re hoping to get the green tick from all that end-to-end testing and go live this half,” she said.
“We’re also spinning up a team to work on what will be the first release for Australia sometime next year.”
Suncorp currently has job postings out for a service delivery manager and senior configurator to work on the Duck Creek platform.
Touted as a low-code, software-as-a-service for policy and billing, Duck Creek will replace “multiple on-premises legacy systems” at Suncorp, the vendor said in December.
The multi-year deal also includes Duck Creek’s Clarity product for data, insights and artificial intelligence”.
During the tests in New Zealand, the insurer saw the time taken for certain “simple tasks” reduced from three-to-five minutes to 30 seconds.
At the forefront
Suncorp recently sold its banking operations to ANZ and is now a pure-play insurance provider.
During the half-year presentation, Suncorp CEO Steve Johnston referenced the insurer’s shift to the cloud and its technology investments, which currently include a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and “full-scale production” of its artificial intelligence use cases.
“We’ve already moved our data to the cloud,” he said.
“We’ve got the pricing engine into which we feed multiple proprietary and external models, and now we’re embarking on the core policy administration system replacement, via Duck Creek.
“All of these mean we will be leading the industry in the development of modern personalised insurance products supported by a best-in-class claims capability.
“The insurance industry is going to modernise materially over the next decade… and we want to be at the forefront of that.
“To be at the forefront of that change, you have to invest in core systems and we’re doing that.”
Suncorp ended the half-year period with a net profit after tax of $1.1 billion [pdf]