The premier pan-African financial services group is establishing a foundation for digital transformation on AWS—accelerating innovation, reducing IT infrastructure costs, and harnessing machine learning to deliver more personalized customer experiences
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that Old Mutual has closed its on-premises data centers and migrated its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure, including its banking, insurance, and wealth management systems, to AWS. The migration represents a significant step in Old Mutual’s digital transformation. Old Mutual is using AWS’s proven, secure, and highly performant infrastructure to decrease financial transaction processing time by two-thirds, reduce downtime by 50%, streamline the development of new and more relevant insurance products, and drive innovation across its business with machine learning (ML).
The full migration to AWS involved moving more than 2,000 on-premises servers, 215 applications, 1,786 databases, and more than 500 websites. The move will accelerate innovation, at a time of global economic uncertainty, by reducing the time required for new application testing from months to minutes.
With its cloud migration complete, Old Mutual will use AWS capabilities to better anticipate customer needs and develop the next generation of financial products and experiences. The company will leverage AWS ML and generative artificial intelligence (AI) services—including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models—to generate real-time, personalized financial forecasting and recommendations for customers. Examples of benefits include the ability to anticipate changing savings needs as customers approach retirement, recommend insurance products based on changing income levels and life stages, and help entrepreneurs plan for investing their incomes as their businesses grow. The personalization services are made possible by the expansion of Information Fabric, the data lake that Old Mutual established on AWS. The single, consistent view of customers provided by Information Fabric enables individualized recommendations and more seamless, intuitive customer experiences, including combined client rewards programs that enable points earned in one area of the business to be redeemed through another.
Old Mutual is also incorporating AWS training into management courses to help senior managers and leaders across the business to adopt a cloud-first mindset and product development strategy. Since 2019, 50% of the financial group’s business and technical leaders have earned at least one AWS Certification. Cloud-first thinking is informing Old Mutual’s expansion strategy across the 14 countries its pan-African operations serve. Innovative partnerships with cloud-first vendors, such as the API management platform Kong Konnect and the data management platform Tamr Cloud, will help to improve financial accessibility in these markets through innovative banking as a service (BaaS) solutions.
“Daily server outages. Disconnected financial products. Ballooning on-premises costs. Those are all challenges we leave behind as we go all-in on AWS,” said May Govender, acting chief information officer for Old Mutual Limited. “Our AWS digital infrastructure has become the backbone of reliable service—a launchpad for future growth. AWS is helping us imagine new possibilities at every level, providing us with a suite of innovative services like generative AI that will spur new customer experiences that can differentiate Old Mutual in the future.”
“The completion of Old Mutual’s all-in migration to AWS represents the next chapter of their digital transformation, and we’re excited to help them harness their momentum in the cloud to unlock new innovations,” said Chris Erasmus, country manager at AWS. “Old Mutual is using our leading infrastructure to increase performance, reduce processing times, streamline operations, simplify customer experiences, and reduce costs. AWS will continue to collaborate with Old Mutual as they deliver the next generation of financial products.”
Since 2014, Old Mutual has leveraged AWS’s broad portfolio of cloud services, including compute, storage, analytics, and databases, to digitally transform the business and unlock innovation for customers. In 2019, the company selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and launched its ambitious migration project.
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