Digital Transformation

Challenge: using digital technology to close the gap between policyholders and traditional pension funds.

Challenge: we wanted to found a start-up that made it easy to book individual trips.

Challenge: making a leading insurance company’s self-service offers competitive.

Challenge: a new digital platform for external asset managers needs to efficiently cover all existing and future requirements, including regulations.

For many Swiss, the regular AHV and pension fund pensions will not be sufficient to enable them to live as well after retirement as before (annual pensions have fallen by almost 9% in real terms since 2005, see Figure 1). Although it would make sense to voluntarily put money into the pension fund, the...

Whether in a private or business context, the importance of digital customer services is growing. However, banks are not yet positioned to offer all central processes digitally in an automated manner. We show an example of how this could work.

October marks the end of an intensive period during which Acrea and I personally supported the SWICA health insurance company for 1 year as Head of IT ad interim. With Fabian Ringwald, SWICA is now getting a passionate digitizer. We wish him every success and exciting challenges.

How does a Swiss health insurance company manage to set up an enterprise architecture (EA) without becoming more bureaucratic? This article describes along a real-life project at SWICA how EA can support digitalization as an instrument for dialogue and guideline for projects.

In the context of company takeovers, due diligence is usually used to check the condition of the target company, whether there are any unexpected risks and whether a price demanded is considered justified. There are many pitfalls in such due diligence ...

In my previous mandate, I spent about a year dealing with the question of what digitalization for a health insurance company in the Swiss market could look like. The client I worked for was by no means at the beginning of its digitization journey, but had already invested heavily in digitization in recent years. But what is the big mistake with digitization in the healthcare market?

How do new digital offerings influence user behavior? We are confronted with this question again and again in our projects. Web or app analytics can be used to create targeted analyses of the usability of digital offerings. This provides a good analysis of the impact of changes in the user journey or the features offered. However, this approach falls short when it comes to the holistic analysis of customer relationships and customer behavior. Here, further data is needed.

APIs have long been viewed through technical glasses only and have been seen as an IT department responsibility. But in the course of digitalization and the new cloud era, more and more customers are asking whether a service can also be used via APIs. What are the specific characteristics of an API? Is an API necessary? And if so, what makes an API successful?

With a well-designed API, service providers can stand out from their competitor’s products and be more successful in the market. To design APIs well, the right approach and some adjustments in the company are necessary.

Imagine you get your physical account statement from your bank once a year. Apart from that, you can only conduct banking transactions by mail or direct contact. Does this scenario also sound to you like something that belongs to the distant past in the age of e-banking, mobile banking and neobanks? Fortunately, the digitization of banking business is already well advanced. The situation is different, however, when we look at the area of retirement provision and, in particular, that of many pension funds. After all, shouldn't the same convenience be possible there? And couldn't pension funds themselves also benefit from a similar development to that experienced by banks?

An integral part of effective digitization is that banks and all other companies understand the importance of changing customer identities. Simple and secure processes for customers on the one hand, and targeted delivery of sought-after services at the right time on the other. This often involves a fundamental transformation of the bank's customer identity management. Yet in a world that is increasingly moving toward the customer in the wake of customer centricity, this can hardly be avoided. Your customers will definitely be grateful.