In Person: Allianz Insurance’s chief information officer, Jacob Abboud

On being a technological company, what it has changed for brokers and customers as well as what is coming next.

With his second hat on, that of being a member of Allianz’s global IT council, he points out the worldwide business has moved from 160 data centres to six.

Brokers will not see a lot of it. He cites Steve Jobs, paraphrasing that it takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.

“They [brokers] want something that delivers an optimised customer journey without the need to rekey,” he says.

The “stuff” and “complexity” in the background is going to lead to more for brokers as the insurer builds interaction portals.

“We get input from brokers and work with our colleagues who deal with brokers on a day to day basis,” Abboud sets out.

“We understand the pain points for brokers and what they are looking for.

“We are using agile teams to focus on building those capabilities,” he confirms.

Suspicions remain about just how agile any multinational can really be.

We get input from brokers and work with our colleagues who deal with brokers on a day to day basis. We understand the pain points for brokers and what they are looking for

Large cumbersome organisations are famed for delaying the adoption of new technology. Generally by the time they pick up on it and make services generally available, the bandwagon is in the next county.

“We need to be agile in how we do things,” he counters. “We have transformed what we do and how we do it.”

The crux of his argument is that Allianz has the expertise, capability, capital and access to the cloud to be able to act like a start-up.

It builds cross functional small teams led by a product owner empowered to make decisions.

We need to be agile in how we do things. We have transformed what we do and how we do it

The process begins with a focus on the minimum viable product and the bar is raised from there. The group can go through several iterations of what is being developed via “sprints”.

These he defines as a way to “mitigate the risk of spending a lot of money and ending up in the wrong place or coming across difficulty that will lead to cost overrun or timescale overrun”.

In essence issues can be dealt with as the process goes along. Projects heading in the right direction are allowed to continue while those that will clearly never clear that minimum hurdle are ditched.

He believes what used to take 24 months is now delivered in six.

“Although we might appear to be a big organisation that does not act like a start-up, actually what we do and are progressing towards becoming more, is similar.”

In effect a siloed way of working has been ditched for what he terms “a winning formula”.

Abboud stresses that among the personnel will be compliance and security experts as he also lists how they draw on project managers, business analysts, technical, pricing and underwriting experts as well as developers and more to build the most appropriate bespoke team each time.

“In everything that we do we focus on security,” he underlines. “It is fundamental to what we do.”

In Person

• Broker

In Person: Andrew and Richard Bartlett

• 16 Oct 2020

• People

In Person: Pen Underwriting CEO Tom Downey

• 22 Jul 2020

• Technology

Q&A: Polaris managing director Vivek Banga

• 19 Mar 2020

• Broker

In Person: Stuart Reid

• 17 Mar 2020

• People

In Person: Amanda Blanc

• 12 Feb 2020

• Insurer

In Person: Markel UK’s Neil Galjaard and Nic Brown

• 31 Jan 2020