Sanjeev Gupta: The program that we did actually commence back in October 2019 and was completed in August of 24 so last year, it came about as we at HBF found ourselves at the centre of three key strategic challenges. Some of them are even valid today.
So affordability around private health insurance, demographic trends, which Australia has an aging population, and which means increase in chronic illnesses, putting pressures on claims, inflation and competitive landscape, where we had, really, as I call it, using a cycling analogy, fallen behind the peloton, and the only way to sort of, you know, get ahead is to first catch up with the peloton.
So our transformation program was designed to to meet these challenges that are reflected in our our market price position, complex products, suite and our aging system.
So a three fold strategy was introduced to modernize the systems and operations by creating the best possible experiences for our members, providers and employees, and to establish the foundations of a more sustainable organization ready for future growth.
The scope of this program, SaaS migrate our legacy system, which was a mainframe based, COBOL based, core insurance platform, to a public cloud based modern architecture platform so a new core insurance platform that includes product policy claims.
It’s hosted on AWS, as I was alluding earlier, a new CRM, new marketing automation system built on Salesforce, enhanced member portal, our redesigned website and new app, as well as a new data platform, which was built on snowflake.
And we did all of this while changing our way of working and the operating model to implement a scaled agile model as well. What it, what it sort of delivered for us, is increasing operational efficiency. To give an example.
It’s quite simple, but you know, when our members have event like, you know, they, they have a birth of a baby, typically, before the transformation, if they were to add a baby to their existing policy.
It took us anything between 30 to 40 minutes with some inherent procedure complexities, multiple screens that our frontline team had to navigate today with a single pane of glass and streamlined processes with our CRM and core insurance platform integrated, this process can be completed in about five minutes.
Similarly for our employee and member empowerment, you know, faster delivery with those modular components means our teams can iterate and continually build new features without tripping over each other.
The release of the my HBF portal that I was talking about is allowing our members to manage their private health cover in their way, and there’s no need for them to rely on the operating hours of the call center or the prime challenge, and they can make their claims.
They can update their details, they can view their limits and usage. They can view their policy details. They can change their communication preferences. So all of this has allowed us to improve our member experience and also the employee experience.
