Microsoft 365 Empowers Smart Office and the Digital Transformation of AXA Tianping

In the post-pandemic era, for every business team of AXA Tianping, whether forced to work remotely or actively embracing hybrid work to meet business demands, a powerful office application platform could considerably reduce the hassles of remote working, enhance team efficiency, and promote corporate transformation. Microsoft 365 strikes a balance between agility and security, making it the right tool we need for our digital transformation. 

—Philip Yu, COO, AXA Tianping Property & Casualty Insurance Company Limited

AXA Tianping Property & Casualty Insurance Company Limited (“AXA Tianping”) is a wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary of AXA, a Paris-based world-leading insurance and asset management group that operates in 54 countries and regions and ranks in the Top 50 of Fortune 500 as one of the oldest Fortune 500 companies. AXA Tianping endeavors to meet constantly changing customer demands in the fields of car insurance, health insurance, commercial insurance and property & casualty insurance with comprehensive and customized quality products and services through its 25 branches in 20 provinces around China that serve more than 3.3 million individual and commercial customers. Based on a customer-centric philosophy and the corporate vision of "from payer to partner", the company fully understands the differentiated insurance needs of Chinese families, makes technological and distribution channel innovation, and leverages global experience and competitive resources to provide customers and their families with world-class diversified insurance solutions.

Driven by the surge of financial technology, AXA Tianping makes "digital transformation" a prominent strategy for its business upgrade. To realize digitization, AXA Tianping focuses on smart office construction for improved business resilience and better office experience, and continues to tap into the value of data to enhance operating efficiency, while ensuring information security and compliance.

• Microsoft 365 offers integrated smart office products and services to facilitate hybrid working at AXA Tianping.
• Microsoft 365 supports AXA Tianping to manage data assets and extract the value of data. 
• Microsoft 365 complies with industry security and compliance specifications, conforms to the trend of internationalization, and lowers the total cost of IT ownership. 

Smooth communication promotes smart office

A smart collaboration platform is the foundation vital to AXA Tianping’s digital transformation. The platform, instead of a mashup of multiple products, shall incorporate various solutions with a core, which is Microsoft 365.

As AXA’s wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary, AXA Tianping must keep close communication with the global headquarters and the Asia Pacific team. Close communication is also essential between AXA Tianping’s head office and its branches since it is a nationwide company with operations in 20 provinces. Microsoft 365, the core office application platform extensively used in AXA, facilitates smooth and efficient remote communication between AXA and the company, between business teams, and between its head office and the branches, and enables efficient flow of information across teams.

As it promotes the smart office mode, AXA Tianping is also developing the next-generation smart office system, which advocates reasonable use of resources in the physical workplace and smarter and more efficient digital office. Based on the features of hybrid working, AXA Tianping came up with the “shared cubicle” solution. “This is an operating mode where the desks no longer have telephones or personal furnishings. Our employees log into their own work accounts on a shared tablet and set up their own office environment.” said Gao Run, the promoter of “shared cubicle”. The system independently developed by AXA Tianping features a unified user identity platform at the core and connection with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams that every employee uses, to create consistent smarter office experience for the staff. 

The practice of smart office brings a whole new opportunity for the company’s digital transformation, and poses new challenges for information security and compliance. AXA Tianping is proactively evaluating the Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) in Microsoft 365, and expects to use Microsoft Intune to strengthen its access compliance policies for office equipment including office terminals and mobile devices, so as to provide more centralized management of access and application deployment for remote users. In addition, it has begun to implement dynamic conditional access policies that continuously evaluate and validate the employees’ secure access ability, and uses the data loss prevention and information protection policies of Microsoft 365 to build a strong fortress of corporate information security.

Management of data assets empowers operational optimization

As a property & casualty insurance company, AXA Tianping has a wealth of structured and unstructured data in marketing, insurance acceptance, settlement of claims, and value-added services, that includes customer information, policy information and investigation records. Its employees, especially in finance, product, actuarial and claim departments, also have higher requirements for data analysis and innovative applications.

Given its industry characteristics, AXA Tianping must ensure the security of its office data and documents and the information privacy of its customers. The security of these documents, which are part of its digital assets, are self-evidently important. With SharePoint Online in Microsoft 365, AXA Tianping provides corporate-level knowledge management space for every department and project team. All employees can manage and access shared digital assets based on their respective access rights, and collaborate remotely based on the documents in a hybrid working mode. 

With SharePoint Online, AXA Tianping’s employees can find the latest documents shared by their teammates, and see the corrections and revisions made by their co-workers in the most intuitive way, all of which are automatically saved in the shared team space, providing critical assurance of the compliance and traceability of AXA Tianping's digital assets. SharePoint Online also allows simultaneous document editing so that when drafting a project plan together, the employees can edit the document collaboratively in real time, and they can use document-based messaging anytime when there is a problem, which means every communication is based on the context and the work results will be delivered to the team’s business process in time.  

In its everyday business process, AXA Tianping has formed a profound data culture. The big data department actively promotes the application of Microsoft Power BI and other products in the mining of data value. The integration of Power BI and Excel greatly lowers the threshold of complicated data analysis for users. AXA Tianping has aggregated and categorized various business data, realized hierarchical design of data warehouse, and realized management of data as an asset through data governance. In the meantime, AXA Tianping continues to deepen the application of data in business scenarios, and continuously optimizes business processes with insights, projections, decisions and actions to support operational transformation. 

Improved system security reduces maintenance cost

Microsoft enables AXA Tianping to sustainably develop and deploy its information security strategy with the security of cloud-native architecture, the controllability of user access, the protection of application and data, and the smart detection and fixing of risks and vulnerabilities.

AXA Tianping is enabling nationwide offices and relatively dispersed business personnel to quickly connect to the unified Microsoft 365 environment flexibly through IT centralized authorization, where they can carry on their usual habits, and work efficiently with the help of Microsoft 365 cloud services.

AXA Tianping is also gradually migrating locally deployed Exchange Server enterprise mailbox to Exchange Online. The cloud mailbox in Microsoft 365 has huge storage space that supports mega attachments. It is no longer limited by local storage space, thus greatly reducing the deployment cost and maintenance pressure of the IT team.

In terms of security, Exchange Online provides powerful spam filtering features that proactively monitor for malware and potential viruses, and ensure only legitimate emails make it into employee inboxes, which greatly prevents information security risks caused by phishing attacks.

In addition, AXA Tianping's infrastructure team is actively promoting the use of OneDrive for Business within the company. OneDrive provides all employees with a massive net disk that conforms to corporate data storage specifications for information security and compliance, so that the staff needn't worry about losing data anymore. Once they log into the computer again and synchronize OneDrive, all data lost will be back intact, which is safe and convenient.