Making Digital Work

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.

Acrea has held an internal hackathon with all consultants participating. The aim was to deal with machine learning in a practical way. It started with tutorials conducted with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio. A sense of achievement quickly set in. The visual tool is easy to use and nicely visualizes the data flow. It as pure cloud solution and free for smaller experiments: highly recommended.

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...

Do you know how much more or less money you will have at your disposal after retirement? It's not easy to calculate: you need AHV and pension fund data, you need to take tax effects into account, and it takes time because it takes two to four weeks for a statement of your individual AHV account to be delivered.

The Swiss retirement provision is a complex system. It is difficult for individuals to find out how much money they will have at their disposal after retirement. To change this, Acrea has launched the OpenPK initiative.

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.

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?

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.

Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for Acrea: highly experienced digitalization expert and transformation manager Stephan Odermatt is joining the company as a partner, opening up new avenues for us and our clients.