Trace Id is missing
November 14, 2020

Manulife puts customers first and drives innovation using Microsoft cloud solutions

Manulife is on a journey to becoming a digital, customer-centric leader, and therefore it understands the value of the cloud in achieving its goal within financial services. Manulife chose Microsoft Azure as one of its cloud platforms, migrating and modernizing its business-critical applications to improve agility, scalability, risk management, and cost-efficiency and to accelerate the support of new business models. The company makes smart use of cloud capabilities like Azure and Microsoft Teams to build digital experiences and help its employees and customers work together and stay connected from anywhere. This capability proved to be an essential part of the company’s COVID-19 response.

Manulife

“Being in Azure puts us on track to deliver ongoing improvements to our offerings, solidify our position as a digital leader in the industry, and bring our customers the best possible service.”

Shamus Weiland, Global Chief Information Officer, Manulife

At Manulife, the path to great customer experience is served well digitally.

“Our customers have come to expect efficient, frictionless, always-on digital solutions in all aspects of their lives,” says Shamus Weiland, Global Chief Information Officer at Manulife. “Digital technologies provide data transparency and choice and serve customer needs very well. Our ambition at Manulife is to be the most digital, customer-centric global company in our industry.”

An important part of Manulife’s digitization initiative has been an enthusiastic adoption of the cloud. In fact, Manulife is one of the world’s top consumers of Microsoft Azure cloud services across all industries. 

“Cloud computing offers capabilities not available in traditional computing. With the pace of innovation, the capability gap will only widen, making it imperative for our technology strategy,” says Weiland.

The company’s cloud journey involved migrating some of its business-critical applications to Azure and unlocking capabilities that weren’t possible with on-premises deployments. Its move to the cloud has also promoted greater collaboration within the company and helped Manulife discover new and better ways to fulfill its role as a digital, customer-centric leader.

A cloud platform aligned with company goals

Manulife provides insurance solutions, along with wealth and asset management products, to 28 million customers in Canada, the United States, and Asia. The company strives to help customers make decisions easier and lives better. And Manulife focuses on customer needs with leading technology as an enabler to make that possible.

When Manulife first considered moving to the cloud, the company considered the cost efficiencies that cloud computing provides as well as benefits that go much further than that. “Cloud computing has grown tremendously, adding features and functionality that weren’t even thought of a few years ago,” says Weiland. “Moving to the cloud also freed us from the historical encumbrances of traditional infrastructure. Now our engineers can focus on continually improving service for our customers.”

When Manulife evaluated cloud platforms, Azure stood out from the pack. “We chose Microsoft as a trusted cloud provider because of its global scale and the values the company holds around great customer service and constant improvement,” says Weiland. “Azure continuously evolves in ways that help us innovate and deliver the premium level of service we strive for, and it’s only going to get better.”

Continuous learning and improvement are essential to the company’s technology strategy. Through the Manulife University program, employees can take practical courses to get hands-on training in the tools and skills they need to serve Manulife customers with speed, efficiency, and agility. So far, nearly 700 engineers have completed coursework that helps them make the most of Azure services and cloud-related products.

Multiple projects to modernize company operations

Manulife’s cloud-trained engineers have tackled a range of work, like developing new channels for customer interactions and migrating—and in some cases upgrading—existing on-premises systems to take advantage of Azure capabilities. Notable cloud projects include deploying virtual meeting capabilities for agents and customers and transforming the company’s global valuation system.

By modernizing these core systems, Manulife is providing agile platforms to support new business models and improve key processes. And by moving them to the cloud, the company can improve risk modeling with powerful, scalable computing resources. Incorporating virtual capabilities into agent interactions is helping Manulife deliver differentiated policyholder experiences that enhance human-led channels for richer customer experiences that are flexible and cost-effective.

Project: Virtual interactions with agents

Traditionally, Manulife treated digital and face-to-face interactions as separate channels, but as the company has delved deeper into digital options, the two have merged into a new channel: virtual face-to-face. Manulife has been successfully using Microsoft Teams, part of Microsoft 365, as a tool for collaboration and remote work, and the company uses Teams to deliver the virtual agent interactions. Manulife has deployed this new format to its Hong Kong office customers, and it plans to expand the rollout to other Manulife customers around the globe.

“Using Teams meetings, we’re able to host virtual conversations between our customers, advisors, and agents, where we bring in visualizations and proposal models and offer an assisted experience in real time,” says Weiland. “While in a Teams meeting, we use the screen-sharing capabilities, and we use the recording feature to capture customer consent, so we have full transparency and accountability.”

Because the visits are virtual, rather than physical, Manulife has found that agents can reach more people in an extremely convenient way, while maintaining the individual attention that comes with real-time, person-to-person communication. The Hong Kong Insurance Authority approved the solution, making Manulife one of the first insurers in the market to deploy virtual meeting technology.

Project: Global Actuarial Valuation System Transformation

Financial services companies need a robust, comprehensive valuation system that can calculate the value of the company’s assets for investment analysis, budgeting, and financial reporting. Manulife has always had a first-class reporting process, but the company must adapt to ongoing regulatory changes that vary from country to country—a process that can be complicated. In addition, through acquisitions, Manulife reached a point where it had 10 different types of valuation systems, which produced a complicated network of models and required extensive maintenance. Computing requirements were also growing, with no end in sight.

To address these issues, Manulife embarked on the Valuation System Transformation (VST) project, aiming to deliver a better, faster, more efficient, and more flexible solution that could cope with future regulatory changes and significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of the valuation process. A key aspect of the new architecture built on Azure is that it can cope with high spikes in compute demand during reporting periods.

“VST is a great example of how we can take advantage of the elasticity of cloud computing power and only pay for what we need, when we need it,” says Weiland. “That makes it easier for us to run simulations and models that make us a better, more-informed company with appropriate risk levels. And we can do it at a price point that just wasn’t possible with on-premises computing.”

Manulife now has a valuation infrastructure that teams around the globe can use not just for standard valuation, but also for asset liability modeling, risk modeling, and other use cases. “What began as a purely valuation-focused transformation has actually broadened to a transformation across the whole company,” says Jon Bradbury, Project Leader, Valuation System Transformation at Manulife. “We’ve replaced desktop computers, server farms, and mainframes, and we’re now managing trillions of data points in the cloud in an efficient and cost-effective way.”

Valuation now happens faster with the system in the cloud. “It used to take six days to complete the valuation process, and now we do it in two days," says Bradbury. “That gives us four more days to really dig in and understand our numbers so that we can go to market knowing that we have the best possible liability estimate. In my opinion, that’s priceless.”

For more information about the VST project, read this case study and this technical case study.

Cloud benefits for everyday operations and exceptional circumstances

Manulife sees its digital transformation and move to Azure as an ongoing process that carries new benefits every step of the way. At this point in the journey, with more than one-third of its applications in the cloud, Manulife has seen clear business results in terms of the velocity at which its developers can move and the success they’ve had delivering innovative new solutions.

“In terms of benefits, I would call out the speed at which our teams can spin up and spin down virtual machines that they tailor to meet the needs of their particular projects,” says Weiland. “Agility is another important benefit. We can organize our teams around customer experiences and deliver results based on what the data is telling us about how customers are reacting to our solutions.”

Shifting to the cloud has also helped Manulife make the most of the company’s global scale, increasing the return on its cloud investment. “When we develop a solution for one of our markets, we now look at ways we can apply that same solution in other markets and repurpose our software assets,” says Weiland. “That way, we maximize the number of customers who benefit from new innovations.”

Having IT resources in the cloud and using Microsoft 365 collaboration tools like Teams and Yammer has proven to be a tremendous asset for Manulife when addressing the operational changes resulting from COVID-19. “We have been able to stay connected with colleagues and customers while working from home in individual, team, and large-scale townhall experiences,” says Weiland. “I can focus on delivering services and meeting customer needs, while Microsoft provides the scale and continuous improvements to its services to make us more efficient. It removes a lot of the friction for me and my employees.”

Through efforts such as the virtual face-to-face agency sales platform in Hong Kong, Manulife has been able to support and engage with customers, even during periods of quarantine and social distancing. Employees have also continued to work closely with each other, coming up with creative ways to use Teams for collaboration and to keep the business running smoothly. The company now does virtual onboarding of new employees, for example, and Manulife strives to make that virtual experience as comprehensive and welcoming as possible.

A customer-centric approach to modernization

Expanding the use of Teams is one way that Manulife is modernizing its entire workplace. As the company deploys new solutions, it has recognized the importance of adjusting its rollout strategies to optimize employee adoption. In the case of Teams, Manulife let employees decide for themselves when they would make the move from Skype for Business.

“We didn’t mandate that all employees switch to Teams on a certain date,” says Weiland. “Instead, we made it available for them to adopt when ready. In this way, we achieved large-scale adoption very quickly and created advocacy for this change. Our employees recognize the value that it adds for them and they’ve become advocates, encouraging colleagues to take advantage of new features.”

Modernizing core systems is another key aspect of Manulife’s digital transformation, and as with everything the company does, customers come first in all calculations.

“The key to our modernization approach is to focus on serving our customers, rather than on the technology,” says Weiland. “We think first about what our customers need and then investigate how technology can best enable that. In that way, technology modernization becomes an iterative process of delivering greater value that is focused on our customers. Along the way, we make our systems more future proof, and we make our delivery more agile so we can bring new products to market faster.”

As Manulife continues its digital transformation, the company intends to keep raising the technology bar for the entire financial services industry, with help from Microsoft. “When we look at the Microsoft technology roadmap, we see tremendous potential to enhance customer experiences and deepen customer relationships with AI and machine learning,” says Weiland. “Those technologies require a lot of computing power, and Azure delivers that in a cost-effective way. Being in Azure puts us on track to deliver ongoing improvements to our offerings, solidify our position as a digital leader in the industry, and bring our customers the best possible service, now and in the future.”

Find out more about Manulife on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.


“Azure continuously evolves in ways that help us innovate and deliver the premium level of service we strive for, and it’s only going to get better.”

Shamus Weiland, Global Chief Information Officer, Manulife

Discover more details

Take the next step

Fuel innovation with Microsoft

Talk to an expert about custom solutions

Let us help you create customized solutions and achieve your unique business goals.

Drive results with proven solutions

Achieve more with the products and solutions that helped our customers reach their goals.

Follow Microsoft