First short term insurance chatbot to market

Founded in 1957 Liberty Life is a well known and respected financial services company in South Africa, offering a range of long term investment and insurance solutions including life insurance, annuities, retirement planning and various other investment

In 2016, Liberty Life embarked on a large-scale organisation-wide digital transformation project. The aim of the project was not only to modernise legacy systems, but to change the whole culture of the organisation from a risk averse long term insurer towards a more agile and innovative company. This would enable them to roll out disruptive digital products and be competitive against the agile fintech startups of the time.

To lead the digital transformation journey, Liberty appointed global management consultancy McKinsey. As a preferred digital implementation partner for McKinsey, Retro Rabbit was a key player in setting up Liberty’s in-house digital innovation center called dHub.

To lead the digital transformation journey, Liberty appointed global management consultancy McKinsey. As a preferred digital implementation partner for McKinsey, Retro Rabbit was a key player in setting up Liberty’s in-house digital innovation center called dHub.

dHub

The main aim for dHub was to grow internal technical capacity that can not only support the existing business units but also roll out new digital product offerings. The process of establishing dHub was centred around McKinsey’s proven Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model and Retro Rabbit played a critical role throughout all three phases:

Build
During the build phase, the aim was to build a digital product that can be launched and tested in the market within 4 months. Retro Rabbit’s team of designers and developers worked closely with McKinsey to design and implement a digital onboarding solution for Liberty’s core life insurance product.

Operate
The success of the first phase led to three more product teams being spun up in a matter of months. These product teams were now a combination of internal Liberty staff and external contractors from both McKinsey and Retro Rabbit. The focus during this phase was to train and empower Liberty to be able to operate dHub on their own and Retro’s team members were key in ensuring industry best practices were applied throughout the whole software development lifecycle.

Transfer
During the transfer phase, another 3 product teams were spun up and the whole dHub was now being managed by internal Liberty staff with McKinsey only providing support and training. By this time Retro Rabbit’s implementation teams have earned a reputation for delivering quality software in time and our teams not only continued to build products for dHub, but we were also introduced to other business units within Liberty which ultimately led to us landing the prized STI project.

Liberty Short Term Insurance Chatbot

The short term insurance (STI) chatbot project was not only Liberty Life’s first short term insurance product, it was also South Africa’s first insurance platform that was able to support the complete user journey via a chatbot.

The project consisted of building a full omni-channel experience including a mobile app, web portal, social media channels and the chatbot interface then also integrating it all into their core back office systems. Given that short term insurance was new to Liberty, the integration was exceptionally challenging since the majority of the systems and interfaces required for the front ends were either non existent, incomplete or broken. Despite these challenges, Retro Rabbit’s team of implementation specialists manage to take the project from inception through to production in 6 months. The STI project was so successful that The Standard Bank Group decided to acquire STI from Liberty a couple months after the launch.

Deepvision

A key requirement for the STI project was having access to reliable client and product master data. To ensure the success of STI, Retro Rabbit built a rapid access datastore, Deepvision, which gave Liberty systems a single view of client.

Liberty Life did not possess a Master Data Management (MDM) solution and trying to retrieve a single view of the client required aggregating data from multiple legacy back end systems. To ensure the success of STI, Retro Rabbit built a rapid access datastore, Deepvision, which gave Liberty systems a single view of client from more than 10 legacy systems through a user interface and an API layer. Deepvision was extremely fast and reliable and ended up being spun out as its own project to be used by multiple other solutions within the Liberty group.

Challenges faced

A brief look into the biggest obstacles we encountered and how we overcame them:

Risk averse and siloed environment

Extremely risk averse and bureaucratic company which operated in rigid silos filled with political nuances.

Very little standardisation

Liberty grew significantly through mergers and acquisitions, which led to very little standardisation and almost no integration throughout their technology stack.

No single view of truth

No Master Data Management solution in place and very little data governance processes and procedures in place which led to lots of data duplication and no single view of the truth throughout their master data.

Unforeseen gaps in the clients systems

Due to the fact that STI was their first short term insurance product lots of gaps were identified throughout their processes, systems and people whilst sticking to a very optimistic deadline.

Legacy technology

Legacy technology stack was outdated and the company was not ready to embrace Cloud technologies

Pushback on change

Majority of the internal development team and subject matter experts were older generation developers who were not willing or ready to learn new technologies and adapt to an agile software development process.

Lack of an integration platform

A lack of an integration platform capable of supporting the level of integration required by an end-to-end self service product such as STI.

Results Achieved

• dHub successfully incubated more than ten digital implementation teams, all of them building and supporting their on digital products
• Retro Rabbit successfully built and launched STI, which was sold to the Standard Bank Group
• DeepVision spun out as its on product to provide a single view of master data to numerous Liberty projects
• Migrated a large portion of Liberty’s digital channels and legacy systems into the cloud.