In the digital age, customers are accustomed to using their favorite digital services anytime, anywhere with the customer experience they are familiar with.
Our services must meet this expectation. They must be available on desktops as well as on mobile devices, operating seamlessly, and delivering the same, superior customer experience.
To achieve that we are building powerful and flexible digital platforms capable of delivering digital interaction and transaction services, which form the core for customer portals and automated business processes.
These digital platforms are our engine for digitization and enable us to consistently communicate our story, build new business models and exploit new revenue streams.
Allianz Technology plays a critical role in executing our company’s Single Digital Agenda.
Every pillar of Allianz’ Single Digital Agenda—including the GDF, Digital Partnerships, Digital Pure Play, Advanced Business Analytics and Allianz X--depends on the Allianz having common infrastructure, platforms, and IT services that enable us to pursue growth in our digital ecosystems.
The implementation of our Single Digital Agenda requires total collaboration of all of us, especially among leaders in business and IT. We, as Allianz Technology, cannot capture value by ourselves – we need to work together with the business to make that happen.
All of the work done at Allianz Technology focus on one thing: the digital transformation of the Allianz Group globally.
When it comes to company-wide digitization, we need to have in-place a global, digital backbone. This means having a well-structured infrastructure that enables us, for example, to bring common customer journeys worldwide in a consistent manner.
Here we are talking about the technical architecture on which everything is based. Common at its core, but which can also be adapted on the front-end to the local market conditions. Additionally, thanks to the so-called two-speed architecture which enables the parallel operation of both new and legacy processes, we can transform without disrupting our current operations.
Our most important services in the future, such as Big Data, ABS, Telematics, etc., all rely on this type of infrastructure. An interface layer, we call it Core Insurance Service Layer, or CISL for short, connects the core services to the front-end applications such as oneMarketing, oneMobile, and others.
This standardized and modularized structure enables us to quickly and successfully implement new business models using a plug-and-play approach. This is not only important for delivering on today’s digital strategy, but also key for future-proofing ourselves with the IT agility to respond quickly to tomorrow’s business challenges.
In 2007 with an FTE transfer from Allianz Germany, Allianz Technology was founded and charged with becoming the IT services provider for the Allianz Group. And in each year over the past 10 years, we have continued to grow, learn, adapt and reshape to better enable Allianz‘s OEs to leverage IT in capturing more value from their business.
Together with you, we run, optimize, transform and innovate infrastructure, applications and services to co-create the best customer experience. Additionally, we take care to ensure data privacy and security, and we work hard to optimize the overall global IT costs at Allianz.
Despite a long history, Allianz Technology still has some way to go to achieving its mission, as there are still many IT projects happening independently which could benefit from improved coordination with Allianz Technology.
While we are already largely in the driver's seat in the infrastructure area – here we are responsible for 76% of the expenses – the situation is vice versa in the application field, where 73% of expenditures are without Allianz Technology as a partner.
Going forward, a strengthened partnership between Allianz Technology and the OEs will result in smarter, better global IT investments. Our current reality is a distributed matrix of IT responsibilities, so it is particularly important that we all pursue common goals and coordinate our efforts. The biggest problem in this situation would be thinking and working in silos.
During any given day, you engage with many IT products or solutions that are—at most times—simply available and simply working. Often, you only become aware of their importance when they fail.
This also applies to the IT infrastructure within companies. The business operations side usually takes IT simply as a given, a commodity. And that's understandable. When running a business, you simply expect that the IT needed to do your job is functioning properly, and don’t really think about it as being particularly essential in delivering value.
But in fact, the IT infrastructure is the basis for smooth and reliable business operations – each and every day, 24/7.
Today´s innovative digital business models pose high requirements in terms of speed, availability, security, and more. For hassle-free operations and optimal customer experience, a powerful IT infrastructure is essential.
This is especially true in light of the fact that we not only maintain a wide variety of product variations, but that the underlying processes for each product are also complex. Take, for example, natural disasters – in these cases, our systems must be able to cope with a sudden and significant increase through claims, but also through new contracts.
This requires a powerful IT infrastructure. It should be highly flexible, enable high performance computing, and it needs to be reliable and secure in every aspect.
In addition, features including standardization and scalability are critical to ensure decisive competitive advantages for our success.
In a global enterprise like Allianz, if each subsidiary were to manage their individual IT systems on their own, the inevitable result would be increased number of unique systems supported by a wide range of service providers (with varying standards of quality) and ultimately higher costs—impacting our bottom line.
We addressed this problem with the formation of Allianz Technology SE, which is the global IT provider for the Allianz Group.
The team, more than 8.000 employees worldwide in 34 countries, ensures a reliable infrastructure that runs globally 24/7 and assures our data privacy and security standards. It also provides innovative and reliable end-to-end business solutions to support Allianz companies in creating value for our customers and for our Group.
What affects infrastructure also applies to networks and connectivity – uncontrolled growth is damaging and, of course, costly. Just imagine the chaos if all Allianz Group companies would operate their own networks.
This is why we introduced the Allianz Global Network, short AGN, which is now in place for 95 of our global locations. It puts an end to local fragmented networks – and the Allianz-owned network offers secure, efficient and effective end-to-end IP services such as WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP enabling additional networking and telecommunications services like Jabber or Video Conferencing. Thus cross-border and cross-continental cooperation and collaboration gets faster and easier.
When you see pictures of data centers, they usually show large rooms with long aisles with cabinets with servers, and everywhere it hums and blinks – but basically it seems unspectacular and a bit boring.
Of course, a data center must meet the highest standards – that includes 24/7 high availability as well as physical and digital security and stable processes. A poorly designed data center can also cause very high costs – just think about energy consumption.
Our data centers are so-called tier 4 data centers, which correspond to the currently highest standards.
With features including virtualization, replication, infrastructure as a service, and more, our data centers meet the business requirements with regards to agility and performance.
Believe it or not – until now, the Allianz Group operates more than 140 data centers. It is clear that consolidating and reducing this huge number of data centers to just six locations will enable us to benefit from tremendous efficiency and cost advantages.
That's exactly what we want to achieve with our Data Center Consolidation initiative, known simply by DCC. To lead it to success, it is important to understand that mere technology is only half the truth – it is how we collaborate and how we organize ourselves together with a clear focus on execution to complete the DCC program and to achieve the benefits.
The term virtualization refers to the creating a virtual versions of IT infrastructure elements, including virtual desktop and server platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. Virtualization in essence means transforming something that was physical into something that is software.
In a virtualized environment, the workload is not tied to physical hardware and the same physical machine can run several processes in parallel.
This not only leads to higher productivity, significantly reduced hardware and energy costs, but also to much better disaster recovery and faster server provisioning and deployment – so again we are able to increase agility.
Virtualization also enables a high degree of standardization, which is the basis for the automation of our infrastructure in the way we work.
The Cloud! For many, this is probably the most fuzzy term in computer technology. Cloud computing describes the approach of making IT infrastructure available over the Internet without them having to be installed on the local computer. And because the data is no longer on your own workstation or server – they are just in the cloud – there may be still security concerns.
For public cloud solutions, this might be understandable. But there are various cloud approaches including the private cloud. This is a particular model of cloud computing that involves a distinct and secure cloud based environment in which only the specified client can operate – it´s the approach that we actually moved towards.
An important feature of cloud computing is its elasticity, which differentiates cloud computing from previous computing approaches. The term describes the ability to adapt to workload changes by automatically provisioning and de-provisioning resources. This makes sure that available resources match the current demand – an important prerequisite for being able to react highly flexibly to suddenly changing request volumes in order to ensure the best customer experience.
Leveraging the cloud and virtualization we reach an unprecedented level of flexibility and security.
As an example, we are able to provide our employees with state-of-the-art virtual desktops. That means, they connect via their device to the server, where all their data are stored.
As a result, they can work anytime and anywhere with their desired device – be it in a different office, a meeting room or on travel. In “the unlikely event” of a workstation or laptop failure, they simply log in from another device and continue working.
Virtual desktops also provide greater security because employees do not carry confidential company data on a personal device that could easily get lost or stolen.
We all keep hearing from the press about the dramatically rising threat of cyber attacks – and they are becoming increasingly sophisticated, more frequent, and their consequences more dire.
But we are well prepared to successfully combat such attacks! Our overall infrastructure initiatives, including data center consolidation, the highly secure Allianz Global Network (AGN), and, of course, all of our IT security efforts, create the foundation for superior data security. With defined rules and patterns, we can stop suspicious interactions even before they enter our premises.
However, we have taken decisive steps further and have implemented two Allianz Cyber Defense Centers (ACDC), located in Munich and India.
Their primary mission is to manage actual cyber security events or incidents in a way that limits damage, increases the confidence of external stakeholders and customers, and reduces recovery time and costs.
In addition to the provision of highly effective 24/7 cyber-threat detection techniques and procedures, the ACDCs share their expert knowledge.
To further increase the IT and data security of the entire Allianz Group it is vital to align the global IT functions.
To this end, the Global Infrastructure and Security Transformation (GIST) initiative was launched. The task of the division is to build a strong security organization and to develop security and protection solutions for the Allianz Group and to roll them out globally.
You can find detailed information about the initiative here:
https://connect.allianz.com/community/technology/strategy/keypriority/projects/gist/pages/gist
Everybody in the Allianz Group wants to continuously improve our services for our customers and the efficiency of our processes. This is a key asset of our company – but it also poses high demands on IT.
Here´s just an example: To get their job done, our colleagues often need specific data coming from various applications. To ease their lives, they ask a developer to write a small and highly customized piece of software gathering all the needed data and combining them, for example, into an Excel file – automatically, over and over again.
That´s exactly what happened over decades, and yes, it worked.
The downside is: this procedure led to something what IT people are calling a “hairball architecture” – in other words a complete mess under the hood: Everything is connected to everything, but nobody would be able to unwind all the connections.
And now imagine an application needs to be replaced for example to enable us to use state-of-the-art technology – we have no idea what the legacy application is connected to. Simply put – it´s not possible to change one aspect without damaging something else.
But how can we come to a well-ordered IT landscape?
That´s where enterprise architecture comes in, enabling us to define a managed and transparent IT landscape in a way that our people still have the freedom to create improvements and that there´s always room for innovation.
Enterprise architecture is a holistic IT approach that integrates everything:
This ensures that our IT is robust and scalable as well as flexible and efficient.
Such a modern IT architecture would let us reach undreamt levels of robustness and efficiency while keeping its flexibility for what probably counts most in our business today – our ability to change and to quickly adopt new market trends and opportunities. It´s all about time to market these days.
Take Allianz Germany as an example. In the past, we saw a zoo of unmanaged applications, vertical data silos and other issues significantly affecting our daily processes.
When we introduced our core insurance platform ABS, our overall goal was to enable us to operate in a more efficient and holistic manner. The overarching customer management was key, aiming to maintain every customer only one time in the system with all contracts and files attached.
Imagine the benefits for our customer relationship management across departments with enormous synergies in our day-to-day business.
Later we developed customer portals with interaction and integration layers on top of that, followed by a data and analytics layer.
That was our introduction to the Big Data era, paving the way for completely new ways of customer service and the development of new offerings.
At that time we decided to implement a modular two-speed architecture. In easy words, we take two tracks for the further development of our IT. This helps us to develop our customer-facing capabilities at high speed (speed one) while decoupling systems for which release cycles of new functionality stay at a slower pace (speed two).
This allows us to implement the latest technologies without jeopardizing our day-to-day business. We'll come back to that later more in detail.
Here comes a nice example. Since 2017, we are working to exploit two innovative IT trends – microservices and APIs.
Both enable us to create more custom and tailor-made solutions much faster. We are at the beginning, but the target is clear – we want to become much more agile.
Why is that so important? Because in the past the big ones ate the little ones, today the fast ones eat up the slow ones – every day!
What is one of the best-known buzzwords in business today? Agility!
What does that mean again? Basically, the term describes the ability to adopt new opportunities in a timely manner, fast. It´s hard for legacy IT systems to cope with that, but here´s an approach to do exactly that – microservices.
Microservices are key to agile development and fast innovation. In the past, entire teams of developers took months and months to build software as large, monolithic applications. Once they were finalized the business environment often had already changed again. So in some ways you were always behind with that approach.
Today, small independent teams write much smaller apps – called microservices.
They break down large applications into their core functions such as search, recommendations, customer ratings, product catalogs and more. Each is developed independently from another but work together to create a functioning application.
They are stored in so called “containers”. These containers are plug-and-play and enable to build, ship and run any application, anywhere.
The huge benefit of this philosophy: When one microservice is not working in a specific environment, it can be changed or removed without affecting the rest of the entire system.
We already built roughly 40 business services on top of ABS. We also built a number of so-called CISL services to plug-in with the business services.
But wait – what is CISL?
CISL is the shortcut for „Core Insurance Service Layer“. It´s the outcome of an Allianz initiative we can be proud of!
The project goal was to create a common and extensible service layer catalog for insurance processes. It connects the interaction layer with the business layer, aligning and standardizing the interaction between our applications with our business processes.
For example, when we build reusable customer journeys in our Global Digital Factory, we need to have a standardized interface able to talk to different back-ends.
This is very beneficial as we don´t need to invent the wheel over and over again – we can reuse once made developments in different contexts across organizational units and countries.
It´s the job of CISL to make this possible.
Fast adoption of digital business models is vital for our future growth and success – and if you look at what's going on in the digital world, you can feel our the need to act quickly.
But when you evolve fast, you have to be careful not to stumble!
This means the faster we innovate, the more we need to take care not to jeopardize our day-to-day business we still primarily run with existing systems.
Here comes the so-called two-speed architecture into play.
This architecture helps us to innovate and change our customer-facing systems in the fast pace common in the digital world while we decouple our existing (backend) systems with their slower release cycles for new functionality.
At certain points, both worlds are connected and cooperate in the way that the existing backend systems provide data e.g. about contracts and claims to the customer-facing frontend applications.
At some point in the future, much of the functionalities of the existing, slower IT systems will be absorbed into new, smaller applications and changeable at high speed. But until then, thanks to the defined two-speed architecture, we are able to run both worlds without problems.
All the above describes the paradigm shift towards a much more flexible, modular but also harmonized IT of the future. This is also why the next generation architecture was needed! Our global architecture blueprint is our response to this need and it should help us to position Allianz as a truly global, digital player.
The global architecture blueprint was developed and is continuously evolved by our global community of Allianz architects. They decided to design and slice everything into “business capabilities” which really form the centerpiece of our Blueprint. For those of you who want to know more, have a look at the Architecture Community [link to Connect page].
Within this blueprint, we have defined several layers: In the interaction layer, we deal with user interaction and front-end development. In the service layer, we develop, manage and administer our services and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) within a Service Hub and also have our Functional Domains.
By the way: via APIs we can also use services and data from external sources such as SAP, Microsoft or even systems of other insurance companies. These APIs also allow us to offer our services externally, enabling us to monetize our assets in a very new manner – we enter the API economy.
This is where we want to go – this is the future.
The frontend is of central importance – it is the window through which our customers access our systems to communicate with us.
It has to be visually appealing (which is why we need a nice graphical user interface or GUI), user-friendly and trustworthy as the users – our customers – enter their data here.
As we enable direct interaction with our systems the security of the processes and data as well as identity and access management are key requirements. Too We all often we read in the news about the economic and reputational damage of companies whose systems did not offer the necessary security levels. We take that very seriously and are on track.
Providing users with the best possible customer experience, tracking certain pieces of information, personalizing content, and enabling fast, transparent delivery of data from the back-end is mission critical. That´s why we invested a lot of brainpower in this field.
It´s quite obvious – when you want to fully leverage the efficiency potential of your IT landscape it´s wise to focus on one or at least very few platforms.
This is the key reason why we decided to pursue a re-platforming strategy to fully exploit synergies at group level already quite some years ago. We had to put an end to the multitude of historically grown systems, with little to no common functionality.
As the result of this strategy, for our core insurance systems we started carried out the global rollout of ABS and, in Spain and Latin America, of the ePAC platform. Similarly, also in other domains we have agreed on one or at least very few target platforms that should be in place at all OEs. You might have heard about oneMarketing (formerly oneWeb) as a target platform for online advertising, campaign, lead and channel management for example.
This platform strategy was set in place to exploit synergies and benefit from our scale as Allianz across the group.
The daily processes in our business are unfortunately sometimes complex and often very sensitive – wouldn’t you agree?
In such a demanding environment it's good to know that you can rely on a powerful and stable technology backbone.
As it is the operative heart of our entire business we have put great effort in the development of our insurance policy and claims administration system ABS.
ABS has a uniform product model and covers all aspects of policy and claims management across our multiple lines of business such as
It’s fair to state that nobody in the market can rely a backend system the size and quality of ABS – and no, this is not based on feelings and assumptions.
This competitiveness has been reviewed against commercial providers of insurance platforms – and we are head to head. It was also confirmed in various workshops with other insurance companies, saying they´ve never seen such a highly automated backend platform like ABS.
Our ABS-based platform strategy offers a wide variety of benefits in many areas, making us well-prepared for our future business and growth.
First and foremost – and this is key while communicating with our customers – it is customer centric. It provides a uniform customer view, and enables multichannel access via any device and offers an optimum digital customer journey.
Furthermore, we strive for (almost) full automation, the integration of digital channels in print and routing, and more. This allows us to implement the philosophy of straight-through-processing (STP) – as information entered electronically can be transferred from one party to another without manually re-entering, our transaction processes are sped up significantly.
Speaking of speeding up: As ABS enables us to reuse once developed business logic, we can create future solutions much faster than within the legacy environment – another important competitive advantage.
This is also supported by the uniform data model which is – by the way – indispensable for our (big) data and analytics approach.
We are also proud of the system performance improvements despite heavy increases in volumes. In easy words: The scalability of our system is taken care of which is a key requirement for the sustainable success of our digital transformation initiative. There are many examples in the industry which failed in this regard – and this is the worst case for any IT and data driven business.
The popular saying "never change a running system" is obsolete in the context of the fast-paced digital environment we find ourselves in.
But the gradual change from our legacy IT systems – some of them are older than 40 years – to new platforms has to be done wisely – a defined decommissioning strategy and plan is needed.
The plan had to answer many questions, such as which legacy applications are needed for how long, how data has to be handled and possibly archived for how long, which users need to be able to access them, and much more.
We have started to migrate contracts from our old systems to our target platforms. While this was a quite bumpy endeavor also for our operations teams in the beginning, we are becoming more routinized. So far, we migrated 18.8 million policies successfully.
In a nutshell – as part of the defined ABS transformation program we will gradually replace the existing hairball architecture with its unacceptable complexity and then completely deactivate the outdated systems upon completion of the program.
Our latest idea is to develop an insurance ecosystem based on ABS which we would offer to other market players that don‘t have the size and power of Allianz to develop a backend system like ABS on their own. On top of the backend functionalities we want to offer a broad range of services (API based) along the value chain. Thereby, we will also be able to monetize our development efforts and assets.
But it´s not just the money – our role as the provider of the platform will strengthen our standing as a key player in the industry – it will help us to increase trust within the entire insurance community.
Furthermore, the platform will lead to even faster innovation by co-creation, helping us to remain ahead of the curve.
To ignite this development we would offer basic functionality of ABS as open source – but of course we would keep certain core functionality as proprietary software. To find out more, click here [insert link to Connect page].
We already came across another platform: ePAC.
ePac is a platform developed by our colleagues in Spain and meanwhile rolled out to various countries in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.
The development of ePAC was driven by the same motives as ABS – the harmonization of IT applications across Lines of Business and convergence to one common platform.
The key reason the second platform is accepted within the Group is that the design principles of the two – ABS and ePAC – are pretty much the same:
So you see, despite all the consistency and stringency in the implementation of our harmonization strategy – it does not have to be one sole platform worldwide as long as the basics of their architecture are the same.
