Many life insurers face the challenge of managing a complex system landscape and architecture. Legacy systems in life insurance companies are ageing, with inflexible technologies designed initially for specific insurance functions such as policy administration, claims processing, and underwriting. While they contain valuable historical data and embedded business knowledge, these systems pose significant challenges today. They are costly to maintain, difficult to integrate with modern applications, and lack capabilities like automation, real time data analysis, personalisation, and robust security. This results in slower product development, operational inefficiencies, and poor customer experiences. Moreover, legacy systems hinder insurers’ ability to leverage advanced technologies such as AI, cloud computing, and machine learning, which are crucial for competitive differentiation and regulatory compliance.

Recognising these obstacles, insurers are increasingly scrutinising their existing system architectures and assessing their technological readiness for digitalisation. There is a growing awareness that meaningful digital transformation often requires a fundamental overhaul of legacy systems and the broader IT ecosystem.

Acenda (formerly MLC Life Insurance) embarked on a transformation journey by implementing a cloud-based, future-ready life insurance platform to capitalise on market opportunities and deliver enhanced products and performance for its life insurance customers. Acenda could decommission its data centres and achieve significant cost efficiency as part of this transformation.

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