Storebrand and Cognizant – A Strategic Partnership Leveraging Innovation

To future-proof its technology platform, reduce costs and improve customer relations, Storebrand, with its Swedish subsidiary SPP, decided to take its existing services center to a new level with Cognizant in 2015. From the expanded delivery center in Vilnius, Storebrand now enjoys a wide range of services, covering all fields of operations in Storebrand Group. The center is an accelerator for digital transformation and innovation, allowing Storebrand to come closer to customers, market and growth opportunities.

Here, you can watch a 10-minute webcast with Heidi Skaaret, COO at Storebrand, as she talks about how Storebrand realized the center in the Baltics – and the benefits that came with it.

A New Framework for Actuaries
Besides from the ongoing work with strengthening customer relationships and streamlining processes, the Storebrand/Cognizant team also developed a new toolset for actuaries. The actuary work is characterized by complicated processing of massive amounts of data and time pressure. Most insurance companies rely on standard software to handle the challenges, but Storebrand decided to develop their own solution, based on modern programming language and module-based ALM (Asset Liability Modelling). 

The aim was to lower the cost of licenses, to shorten the processing time, and to improve the possibilities to develop their solution further. Storebrand also wanted to become less independent on external consultants and to gain a better overview.

Speed and Performance with Specialized Team
After nine months of work, the new solution Gekko was rolled out and a dedicated team was formed around it. Today, Storebrand holds an IT team both in Oslo and in Vilnius, via Cognizant. The Vilnius team consists of a dynamic mix of IT people, mathematicians and statistical experts with a thorough understanding of the business perspective. This “near-shore pool” is responsible for running and developing the data models – and the Baltic-based modelers are key to success.

It’s a powerful framework that allows actuaries to measure value, manage risk, and protect solvency in a timely manner. For instance, a data processing that previously took 14 days can now be performed within a working day. The advantages include:

• Faster calculations. Performing calculations for Solvency II reporting and analyzing risks/sensitivities up to 50 times faster compared to other available tools.
• Effective minimization of capital requirements through model changes, with close to real-time data.
• Flexibility and speed. Troubleshooting, testing and model changes can be executed quickly thanks to ownership of code and the overall framework.
• TCO reduction. System maintenance cost has been reduced by up to 80 percent.

The new framework was presented during an event in Stockholm, and you can watch the whole presentation on-demand or read a more in-depth description of what the framework covers.

Vilnius Services Offered Broadly
The delivery center in Vilnius now also provides support outside the Storebrand sphere; it addresses all fields of business process operations and IT to Scandinavian finance and insurance businesses. The focus is on continous improvements through automation, robotics and process optimization, and as the center is multi-lingual, its services are offered in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and English.

Among its 600+ employees, there are, among other things, experts with analytic skills, legal knowledge, and specialists in econometrics, AHK (AutoHotKey) programmers, advanced users in MS macro commands, Bloomberg Business users, SQL users, as well as testing users. All in all, the center act as a springboard to digitalization and helps strengthening the customers’ relationships with their own customers.

If you'd like to learn more, also check out Cognizant’s overall insurance offering and the dedicated insurance web that covers trends and technologies affecting insurers.