Fennia Mutual Insurance Company, a Finnish non-life insurance company with roots going back to 1882, continuously seeks to transform its business to offer the most customer-oriented services in the industry. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, Fennia, like most insurers, faced the challenges of increasing competition, market uncertainty, rising regulatory demands and consumer expectations. As a result, Fennia sought to re-examine its business value chain and ecosystems to accelerate digitization.
Rethinking the business to achieve strategic goals
As a forward-thinking company, Fennia is embarking on an aggressive modernization journey called "Future Fennia”, that will span several years. This project involves, among other things, embracing a digitally-enabled operating model to continue to meet the evolving needs of its customers, employees and partners. Fennia plans to leverage three levers for success: modernizing IT, transforming operations and adopting a modern managed services approach.
“In the Future Fennia program, we develop digital services as well as our brand, culture and, thus, our customer experience. Our goal is to be an insurance company that our customers can understand, and that has the most predictive and caring customer relationship and experience, in addition to excellent digital capabilities," explains Petteri Miinalainen, Fennia's Chief Information Officer.
In Fennia’s case, cost containment is a critical factor to drive business growth. The insurer was looking to identify opportunities to rein in costs—in particular, its expense ratio—and increase business agility. It sought to bring together its fragmented legacy IT landscape, reduce the management of too many vendor relationships, improve internal processes and spend less time resolving IT challenges. Fennia also wanted to transform operations to run 24/7 with industrial level IT and security operations.
Fennia looked for a trusted partner with the scale, expertise and experience to help optimize its technology supply chain to build more agility, elasticity, security and resilience into the organization.
Partnering for success
CGI has been a strategic partner to Fennia for many years. Currently, our experts in Finland provide advanced infrastructure services that help Fennia transition to a modern, agile infrastructure. This includes infrastructure consultancy, technology advisory services, service desk, storage as a service, infrastructure rationalization, virtualization and Security Operations Center (SOC) services.
As a next step in its modernization roadmap, Fennia was looking for a reliable and experienced partner to manage application development and maintenance and also provide support services for its end-users and operating environments. This is the first time Fennia was considering outsourcing its application services. Supported by a deep understanding of the company’s core values and systems, a proven track record and a strong relationship built on trust and client intimacy, CGI was the clear choice.
To reduce costs and accelerate delivery, we leveraged our client-proximity model and global delivery network to assemble a team of experts in Finland, Lithuania and India. In addition to supporting day-to-day client interactions and part of the application management services, our Finnish consultants also provide local language support for end-user services—a specific client requirement. As part of the partnership, Fennia will transition 60 of its IT employees to CGI, which enables these new team members to join a global organization where IT is its core business to help grow their knowledge and careers.
Taking advantage of new growth opportunities
Founded on an outcome-based model, our managed services will help Fennia achieve improvements in operational efficiency, productivity and cost savings, serving as an accelerator for building a digital organization that drives growth during these unprecedented times.
In addition to improved service availability and continuity, Fennia will benefit from improved development of IT services and expects to enhance service levels in critical areas such as information security and regulatory compliance. CGI also will help to advance Fennia’s cloud journey through the use of flexible and secure cloud environments and the development of cloud-based applications and platforms.
With CGI assuming responsibility for a majority of Fennia’s IT services, the insurer can now focus on its core capabilities and invest in innovation to drive product development, improve time-to-market, scale its offerings and reinvent the customer experience through the adoption of digital technologies.
