Travel insurer Cover-More Group (Cover-More), which operates in 22 countries, has slashed its enterprise application portfolio by 15% as part of a global consolidation of its IT operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of the CXO Challenge services on The iTnews podcast, Cover-More global chief information officer (CIO) Nicki Doble revealed that the insurer repurposed a cloud planning migration tool to scan its network to identify how many applications existed globally.
“We had 591 applications globally, so for a company of our size, that’s an enormous amount of applications,” Doble said, as reported by iTnews. “And in some applications, there were multiple instances: I had 13 customer relationship management (CRM) systems.”
The insurer has reduced its enterprise application portfolio by about 15%, including nearly half of its global CRM systems and several “pet projects” uncovered along the way.
The ongoing IT changes are part of the insurer’s goal to consolidate its systems across its brand, Doble said.
“The business was operating in lots of different countries, [under] lots of different brands, and they wanted that to continue because they had brand recognition, but they needed the backend system to work as a ‘global brand’, so I was brought in to do that tech strategy,” Doble said.
When she joined Cover-More in March 2019, Doble decided on an “organic bottom-up” approach after briefly considering a top-down strategy.
“Once I saw the diversification in the regions – the different maturities, the different ways the business had been merged – it was really obvious I needed to take another approach,” she said. “Ultimately, I think [that] saved us a lot when COVID hit because it just gave us visibility and a very clear roadmap that I wouldn’t have had [otherwise].”
Cover-More also adopted agile and lean methodologies to undercut the strategy’s cost, according to Doble.
“There are some ‘no regrets’ decisions, particularly around security… or around our CMS… that the business didn’t need a presentation to know that we had to address,” she said. “So the money that we would have necessarily spent on enterprise architecture, we were funnelling that away to do some of the remediation or some of the strategic work earlier.
“Things were running concurrently, or in parallel to achieve that result, which again addressed some of those initial things very early like security,” she added. “But it also meant that we were further down the strategy path than what we would have been if we’d taken a more waterfall approach.”
Alongside rationalisation, Cover-More focused on preparing for the resumption of international travel by speeding up cloud migration during the pandemic and providing its API library with a “massive steroid injection.” The insurer also had an 80% increase in call volumes of claims last year.
Doble said businesses receiving Cover-More travel insurance and medical assistance were all calling into the same PABX system.
“We were very nervous that… if claim volumes got too high, we were at risk that medical assistance calls wouldn’t be able to get through. They need to be answered in 20 seconds,” she said. “So we ended up moving, in a course of four days, our claims call centre out to AWS Connect with a really complicated IVR [interactive voice response].
“That was really good because we… knew we couldn’t go and buy something big and expensive because we knew in two months’ time we were going to be cutting back costs.
“Cloud solutions were very good because they gave us the ability to scale to meet the demand that we needed to at the time, and then when the business tapered off, we were able to then bring that back in and move to a global solution.”
Post-COVID-19 pandemic, Cover-More will focus on “what travel will look like,” with attitudes towards travel insurance likely to change due to the impacts of the pandemic.
“Insurance, in general, is treated like a grudge purchase, so I think it will be really interesting to look at it differently because people’s attitudes will change when they come back,” Doble said.
“But I think we’re moving very heavily into product management frameworks, similar to the tech companies, and trying to think more like tech companies,” she added. “And that will change what policies to sell or how we sell out to our customer.”
