Driven by the will to expand its footprint across Europe, the need to adapt to the expectations of new generations, and the ambition to overturn conventional attitudes to life assurance, OneLife has made the strategic choice to deploy eProseed FSIP, an automation, integration and supervision platform that enables organizations to adapt their business models and operations to meet the requirements of increasingly digital ecosystems.

Eric Lippert is the CIO of OneLife, a European player in life assurance and wealth management. A a specialist in IT transformation, he shares with us the reasoning behind his choice and the resulting benefits, in the company of Laurent Pulinckx, COO of eProseed

 “Leveraging on the new opportunities that digital offers and on our decision to make it a real business enabler, we undertook, almost two years ago, a complete overhaul of our information systems in order to benefit from a sound basis for ensuring optimal transition to digital”, Eric Lippert explains. “We have therefore streamlined the existing systems, deployed new infrastructure elements – servers, storage, networking, security – and implemented new software architecture tools. These are the new foundations that enable us today to deliver innovative digital solutions to our clients, our network of partners and our internal users. We have just launched a new mobile application for our partners who can now view the status of their insurance transactions, at any time and from everywhere. In our industry in Luxembourg, it is a premiere”, he points out.

Streamlining the information systems

“When I took up my post as CIO in early 2015, OneLife’s information systems were based on a heavy, complex and outdated machinery. The reason being that OneLife was formed through the acquisition of different companies, without any genuine rationalization of the IT systems. As an example, on top of an obsolete infrastructure, we had to manage eight printing systems, eight contract management systems, three accounting systems, four extranets, two data warehouse systems, … So, one of our main objectives was to implement common processes for all our insurance portfolios”, Eric Lippert explains. In order to achieve this, OneLife, in collaboration with eProseed, has deployed a service-oriented architecture, new workflow and case management tools, and a new document management solution. The FSIP platform has provided OneLife with technical and architectural solutions for all of its integration and automation needs. “All our insurance transaction management processes are now harmonized and orchestrated by the eProseed FSIP solution tools,” Eric Lippert says. “As for the renewal of our data warehouse system, it is planned for 2018.”

“I am convinced that the IT systems rationalization capabilities of eProseed FSIP are highly valuable assets for fluid, cost-effective and successful digital transformation.” – Eric Lippert

A fluid and consistent software architecture

Given the breadth of the company’s transformation plan, the CIO of OneLife did not want to embark on a way of selecting solutions that would have forced him to repeat the process for each of the elements to be implemented and to raise each time the question of their interoperability. “Our strategy has been to choose a single platform capable of meeting all of our current as well as future needs. This one-stop-shop strategy offers the advantage of a fluid, consistent and harmonious software architecture which allows efforts to be concentrated on business solutions rather than technological issues. Even though we had to convince some stakeholders of the relevance of our approach, this strategy has proven to be the right choice as demonstrated by the subsequent course of events”. And it was eProseed FSIP that best matched the selection criteria thus defined. “With the other providers consulted, I did not find a level of integration and consistency of all the architectural elements comparable to what eProseed FSIP offered”, underlines Eric Lippert.

Turning IT into a tool for creating value

“The IT transformation projects that we carry out aim to achieve three objectives common to many of our clients”, says Laurent Pulinckx. “Our first concern is to automate recurring tasks, thus enabling the reallocation of resources and skills to missions with higher added value, increasing efficiency and improving service quality, which puts the client back at center stage. Then comes the advanced and real-time integration of data sources with a wide variety of formats and interfacing models. Finally, the adoption of a future-oriented platform such as eProseed FSIP makes it possible to integrate the legacy systems in a single solution based on industry standards”.

 “This approach echoes our will to turn IT into a tool for creating value for the company”, adds the CIO of OneLife. “Throughout the execution of our transformation plan, we have always kept in mind that, beyond streamlining costs, we also had to be innovative even if we sometimes had to be the first in our industry to adopt certain solutions.”

When users become advocates for change

If such a transformation of OneLife’s key processes could be carried out successfully, it is because close collaboration was established between the IT teams of the company and the experts from eProseed, but also between those two stakeholders and the users. “The dialogue between the three parties has actually played a significant role in the success of the project,” says Laurent Pulinckx. “The users were not solicited at the end of the project, at the time of testing, as is too often the case. OneLife managed to mobilize the different operational and technical interlocutors under one single leadership, that of its CIO. I also want to point out the role of change agents played by the business users who were involved in the project: they proved to be the best advocates of the new solution vis-à-vis their colleagues.”

 “Out of all the business solution delivery projects in which I have been involved, it is clearly during this one that the users were the most enthusiastic and motivated, both to obtain a pragmatic answer to their needs and to implement change on the ground”, adds Eric Lippert.

OneLife managed to mobilize the different operational and technical interlocutors under one single leadership, that of its CIO.” – Laurent Pulinckx

A platform ready to tackle the next challenges of the digital economy

Less than eight months have elapsed between the beginning of OneLife’s process redesign project and the delivery of the new platform to the users. Meanwhile, more than three million elements were migrated to a new document management system. Today, eProseed FSIP enables OneLife to continuously optimize its services, helps reduce costs and allows more effective portfolio and client management while providing IT as well as business teams with new monitoring and tracking capabilities.

 “FSIP’s automation and integration capabilities and eProseed’s technical expertise have helped us complete a digital transformation that allows us to offer our users a new experience, a more efficient and faster fully dematerialized service. eProseed’s solution not only improves our overall efficiency, but also provides real-time tracking of our clients’ and partners’ transaction portfolios”, Eric Lippert sums up.