http://www.copyright link/technolog...suppliers-and-fintech-flavour-20160308-gnd7ih
AMP will incorporate fintech start-up innovation, including robotic automation, and rework major technology supplier deals, as it makes strides towards completing a $500 million customer transformation program.
Chief information officer of the banking, insurance, financial planning and investment giant Craig Ryman said numerous major technology initiatives had been completed since chief executive Craig Meller declared in late 2014 that plans to overhaul its digital channels would be one of the most significant changes made to the company.
Mr Ryman said a number of big customer data systems had been deployed in the
18 months since he took over as CIO from long-standing former technology boss Lee Barnett, and attention was also now being paid to emerging technology including increasingly intelligent robotic process automation (RPA), innovation from fintech start-ups and advances in cyber security.
The transformation program emerged as AMP recognised that customers no longer relied on face-to-face meetings to make financial transactions. However, making the transition to a world of mobile apps and real-time online interaction required big changes to existing systems and processes.
<img src="/content/dam/images/g/m/x/m/x/q/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1457862113469.jpg" alt="AMP CEO Craig Meller has earlier spoken about the huge change being introduced to AMP by the advance of new digital channels." width="620" class="lazy620x0"/>
AMP CEO Craig Meller has earlier spoken about the huge change being introduced to AMP by the advance of new digital channels. Peter Rae
After waiting in the wings at AMP for 18 years before ascending to the top technology executive role, Mr Ryman said he was well placed to understand how to best introduce new systems to the organisation.
New systems
"From a technology perspective we had to reorient our operating model to allow us to offer more client-facing capability in the digital sense," he said.
Mr Ryman said the acquisition of AXA in 2011 left AMP with a complex mix of different product systems, which then sat separately to customer systems for its different banking, wealth, life insurance and managed investments business lines.
<img src="/content/dam/images/g/n/e/n/1/q/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1457501094619.jpg" alt="Craig Ryman has been delivering new systems as part of AMP's customer transformation program." width="620" class="lazy620x0"/>
Craig Ryman has been delivering new systems as part of AMP's customer transformation program. Jessica Hromas
A crucial part of the company's digital push has been to invest in bringing data together, so that customers can deal with AMP's various products online, without switching between different systems and passwords.
"We put in a master data management platform for a single view of the customer," Mr Ryman said.
"We also put in a new campaigns engine that allows us to take clean customer data, and use an analytics platform to create insight, and we have a campaigns engine to be able to serve that insight up to the customer via whatever channel they have chosen to use."
Mr Ryman said AMP was well on the way to becoming a so-called omni-channel business, and he added changes would continue as it altered the way it buys and deploys technology.
Robotic automation
The use of RPA
has been pioneered by ANZ Banking Group locally, and involves tasks that were previously conducted by employees being done by increasingly intelligent software, which learns on the job.
At AMP, Mr Ryman said RPA was just another step towards automation, which was not yet capable of doing anything sophisticated. However he said it would play a greater role as the technology evolved.
"We need to be mindful that what it is today, is not what it could be tomorrow RPA has moved from a macro to a more sophisticated object, with potentially a bit of machine learning, and will then breach into artificial intelligence at some point … so it is important to be on the journey for that," he said.
Along with other large organisations AMP has started to reconsider the previous model where huge contracts worth hundred of millions of dollars were signed with major technology companies.
CSC deal
This has meant US giant Computer Sciences Corporation accepting changes to the way it works with AMP. Back
in 2012 it signed a deal with AMP worth $220 million to provide IT services and support until 2016.
The relationship between CSC and AMP will continue, Mr Ryman said, but the changing technology landscape and emergence of new fintech players meant its future arrangements would involve shorter contracts and multiple suppliers.
"We have seen companies change pretty rapidly over short periods of time, and need to see if they are keeping pace with the market … CSC is one of our biggest suppliers and over the last few years we have brought more providers into the space they particularly controlled in AMP," he said.
"We will strategically partner with them in this more service-based model. For me CSC aren't having a reduced role, it is a changed role, and it is a role that says we are going to leverage their next generation services."
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