AXA Hong Kong & Macau

Outstanding Enterprises

2

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS WITH AXA HONG KONG AND MACAU

Apost-pandemic world has pushed both companies and technology to evolve and adapt at such an accelerated rate that many have struggled to compete, let alone thrive. AXA Hong Kong and Macau (AXA), however, managed to weather the storm and came out on top, winning at the High Flyers Awards 2022 presented by Hong Kong Business.

In an interview, Gary Ho, Chief Technology Officer at AXA Hong Kong and Macau, he shared his thoughts on how technology powers business transformation in the post-pandemic era.

Navigating through uncharted waters

Being engaged for over 2 decades and having leading roles in multiple insurance companies, Gary has also been taking the lead in developing enterprise solutions architecture for different insurers.

“I have formulated IT strategies and driven multimillion-dollar transformation projects in insurance firms,” said Gary, adding that changes in enterprise architecture are unavoidable with digital transformation initiatives, with these initiatives helping him understand how positive impacts can be created with technology properly used by commercial players.

The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited digital transformations, with many companies starting to speed up their technological initiatives in order to stay competitive. With the younger generation now requiring digital engagement, such as the use of mobile applications and chatbots, companies would have to adopt omnichannel strategy to fulfil the needs of different generations.

Data platforms have had to accommodate external and unstructured data as well as big data, which facilitate the establishment of nextgeneration platforms capable of supporting disruptive products. This data is collected and stored through cloud capabilities with artificial intelligence and machine learning, analysing data to aid business decisions such as the course of action or offers.

In a new era where technological capacities bring opportunities for companies, traditional data is not enough to support a growing ecosystem. External parties such as insurtech firms and digital partners is essential to fill in the gaps. Data has become a core asset in the digital ecosystem where ecosystem partners to share and leverage data to spark innovation.

Digital transformation towards success for AXA

AXA continues to strengthen their strategic ecosystem, which empowered by integrations with strategic digital partners, as most of the insurance companies underwent drastic digital transformation journeys.

AXA also focuses on fostering existing life-long partnerships with customers, taking care of their everyday needs, not only for life and health protection, but also extend to travel, property and transportation.

With 360-degree lifestyle protection available for customers, AXA is able to capitalise on new digital opportunities and make use of their partners’ networks for up-selling and cross-selling, which has raised customer effectiveness successfully. With the support of partners’ digital assets, it helps

PHILOSOPHY

Our purpose is to act for human progress by protecting what matters. All employees in our organisation share the same goal of being a lifetime partner of our customers by providing humanised services and solutions to them.

FAST FACTS

• AXA Hong Kong and Macau is a member of the AXA Group, a leading global insurer with presence in 50 markets and serving 95 million customers worldwide. • Our goal is to be the insurance and holistic wellness partner to the individuals, businesses and community we serve. • At the core of our service commitment is continuous product innovation and customer experience enrichment, which is achieved through actively listening to our customers and leveraging technology and digital transformation.

Opposite page: Gary Ho, Chief Technology Officer, AXA Hong Kong and Macau

us gain valuable insights and identify customer needs.

“I always encourage my team to have a start-up mentality,” added by Gary on how the company strategies drive success and foster a culture wherein the team builds confidence to take risks by experimenting with new things on the market. Team members should collaborate to build a technological vision that aligns with the company’s core values, striving for a positive outcome.

Gary has also shared his vision to steer the organisation away from any ambiguity during the digital transformation whilst also keeping the project on track by proactively involving stakeholders and key parties.

For AXA, cloud-agnostic strategies leveraged the best capabilities from each solution in the industry considering that IT firms or departments now act as a consultant, offering advice and co-working with business departments to drive faster and better solutions driven by technology.

Within the company, collaboration between the business and IT has resulted in technology being applied properly to achieve desired business results and aid business strategy. The acquisition and retention of talents with the right skill set and technological capabilities have been instrumental in AXA’s digital transformation, as the upskilling of employees has helped them keep their momentum and passion to overcome new challenges.

“We adopt a multi-cloud model with inter-cloud in order to combine both and create a seamless mass network for all our applications,” said Gary, adding that the model can be leveraged to extract the best of each cloud solution and support business growth in the long run.

A multi-level cloud programme is also being implemented in AXA to facilitate cloud adoption within the company to utilise cloud of all applications in Hong Kong.

Using their advantages to overcome challenges

As the insurance industry faces a collective challenge in dealing with legacy systems, companies found themselves against highly complex end-to-end modernisation and transformation programmes.

Upfront alignment on the roadmap and framework is critical in seeing any impact across numerous business teams and clients, to ensure consistency across the individual workstreams. During the process of modernising these legacy systems, minimising the business disruption, ensuring the result is as desired, clarifying workflows, and potential enhancement remained the biggest challenges as the complexities inadvertently created by legacy infrastructure left many holes to be plugged.

Changes in a system cannot be easily applied as well due to the fact that they are tightly integrated, which would result in ripple effects across different systems. In order to overcome the potential challenges, Gary states that they have established solid incremental processes that follow the critical business triggers in different stages and strive for successful legacy modernisation with minimal business disruption. “The way we tried to minimise the impacts is to build and align our modernisation framework prior to any implementation,” he commented.

AXA focused on multi-cloud implementation despite the initial set-up cost having the potential to get out of hand given the company’s size in order to capitalise on what is perceived to be the trend of the future. To combat this possibility, phase cloud migrations were implemented wherein the relatively straightforward parts of AXA’s data centres are migrated to the cloud first, in a bid to avoid the heavy costs of replacing them all at once.

AXA’s future with technology

The company plans to further enhance their microservices and improve its agility on launching new products and enhancement by using CI/ CD pipeline to minimise business disruption. They also aim to migrate existing legacy systems and infrastructure bit by bit once the digital platform is enhanced.

For Gary, digital transformation is an ongoing and constant process, one that requires proper oversight in order to achieve their objectives of strengthening their digital ecosystem and dedicating more resources and time to create value for all through customer experience enhancements.