Published on the 12/11/2024 | Written by Heather Wright
Tech modernisation program gathers steam…
Suncorp is pushing ahead with its tech modernisation, including its ERP systems, across Australia and New Zealand, with the financial services group now implementing a new human capital management platform and payroll managed service as part of the work.
It’s also working on consolidating its financial management systems to streamline backend processes.
“We are carefully balancing the opportunities AI represents with the need to operate within a clearly defined risk appetite.”
Adam Bennett, Suncorp chief information officer, told a recent investor briefing that the human capital management and payroll work will simplify business processes and rationalise systems across the employee lifecycle, while the consolidated financial management platform will streamline finance processes.
A new reinsurance management platform, from Duck Creek which is providing the company’s policy platform, is also underway.
Suncorp, which is in the process of selling its Kiwi life insurance business, did not disclose specifics on which platforms would be used for the HCM and payroll work. It is using Adobe Experience Manager for digital experience, and Smart Communications for customer correspondence, along with Databricks and FiveTran for data as part of its policy transformation, dubbed the ‘centrepiece’ of its platform modernisation.
Bennett says the company’s strategy is underpinned by a platform modernisation and AI-enabled operational transformation.
“We believe these enablers will collectively create considerable value for all our stakeholders; they will deliver innovative and affordable customer propositions; simplify and streamline our operations; and more importantly enable our workforce.”
He says the company’s focus remains on improving internal business functions through the deployment of generative AI, with the company seeing opportunities to apply AI across the entire insurance value chain.
“We have prioritised lower-risk GenAI use cases in FY25 which are internally facing to augment our people, with plans to graduate to more externally facing GenAI deployments in later years, as the capabilities mature – for example customer-facing GenAI agents,” Bennett says.
While the company’s FY25 AI portfolio has around 20 use cases deployed or under development he says that is ‘clearly just the beginning’.
Among the use cases already delivered are a single view of claims to support claims advisors with summaries and generating contextualised claims information, and a ‘frontline knowledge assistant’.
“Both these use cases have already had a demonstratable impact, delivering more responsive, accurate and personalised customer service, while also creating efficiency benefits.”
The company’s AI plans extend well beyond GenAI, with Bennett saying it is adopting a holistic AI transformation approach across strategy, foundational capabilities and governance.
“Suncorp has a deep history of applying traditional AI and machine learning models. However, we believe this only scratches the surface of what is now possible using the latest generation of GenAI models.
“Given the insurance industry relies on vast amounts of data – including unstructured data in many forms – the future potential of emerging AI capabilities across our business is almost limitless.”
Suncorp has more than 100 traditional AI and machine learning models in production ‘across the end-to-end value chain, supporting customer sales and service, pricing and underwriting, fraud detection and claims management’, Bennett says.
The company has built an AI platform it calls SunGPT, which orchestrates and securely connects proprietary data assets with market leading large language models. It is using discrete AI utilities, such as Microsoft Copilot, alongside embedded AI in core SaaS platform and intelligent process automation which integrates targeted AI use cases into Suncorp’s business processes and systems.
However, Bennett added that Suncorp’s approach recognises the risks and the rapidly evolving nature of AI capabilities.
“We are carefully balancing the opportunities AI represents with the need to operate within a clearly defined risk appetite.”
The company’s AI strategy can be characterised by three core principles, he says.
“We are taking an enterprise-wide approach (both top-down sponsored, though equally we have galvanised all parts of the organisation with our people already having identified well over 100 potential AI use cases). We are pragmatically delivering use cases where we can drive tangible benefits, considering customer experience, efficiency and improvement of our risk controls, and finally, we are encouraging an innovation mindset to test and learn before we scale out capabilities more broadly.
The company has invested in ‘significant’ education and capability building for its teams, with thousands of staff participating in an ‘AI+U’ learning series, hackathons and more formalised training and reskilling programs.
The company also revealed it has more than 470 robots deployed across its business, automating around 30 million transactions last financial year.
Steve Johnston, Suncorp chief executive officer and managing director, also flagged the companies move to cloud.
“Modern, intelligent, cloud-based core systems that allow agility and innovation in product design will be the rule rather than the exception,” he says.
The insurer has shifted almost entirely from owned and leased data centres to having more than 90 percent of its technology workloads hosted in public cloud.
“This is industry leading and provides us with scalable capacity, improved reliability, better cost transparency and importantly faster change delivery,” Bennett says.
