Australian insurance provider HBF has completed its cloud migration project.
The company began a "digital transformation" project in 2019 that involved migrating its workloads and core systems from a mainframe to the cloud. In total, the move took HBF five years to complete.
As first reported by iTNews, HBF has also established a new core insurance platform for policy, product and claims; new CRM and marketing automation systems; a data platform; and new member service and support platform, among other updates.
The company worked with the likes of PwC, Civica, Deloitte, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Mantel Group on the cloud migration project.
A report by FST Media notes that some of HBF's core systems were more than 20 years old, according to chief information and transformation officer Sanjeev Gupta. Gupta added that some of HBF programs were coded in COBOL, a programming language that is more than 60 years old.
In 2023, FST also reported that HBF had adopted a new data management platform utilizing AWS and Snowflake technologies, alongside a data lake deployed in late 2021, as well as delivering wholesale migration of assets and native builds in AWS public cloud in 2021.
“By modernizing the systems that manage our member policies and claims processing, and by launching a new website and CRM, we will be able to enhance and streamline how our people interact with members and providers," said Gupta. “In particular, these more intuitive systems will provide our people with greater insights to support our members’ evolving health needs and improve the resolution at the first point of contact.”
HBF CEO Dr. Lachlan Henderson added: "With around 80 percent of our member interactions now via our digital channels, the new technology, and systems enhance our ability to deliver on our core purpose of being there for our members in the moments that matter.”
HBF currently has around 1.2 million members and was founded in Western Australia in 1941. It is currently the fifth-largest health insurance provider in the country.
Several insurance companies globally have made the move to the cloud. This year alone has seen the likes of FWD Group and Nib Group team up with AWS, Great Eastern migrate to on-premise Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hardware, and healthcare insurance company Humana select Google Cloud Platform to modernize its IT infrastructure.