SHUTTING DOWN ITS DATA CENTERS BY 2022

Amazon’s cloud arm AWS (Amazon Web Services), has just been selected by Old Mutual Limited to house its 1000+ business applications.

Based in South Africa, Old Mutual is one of the oldest and largest financial services group in Africa that offers a spectrum of financial solutions to retail and corporate customers across majors markets segments in 14 countries.

With plans to shut down its data centers by early 2022, Old Mutual will migrate its digital customer platforms, core insurance applications, and product administration systems to AWS cloud infrastructure.

“AWS provides us with the depth and breadth of services we need to innovate like a startup, with the security expected from Africa’s oldest and most trusted financial services company,” said Johnson Idesoh, Chief Information Officer at Old Mutual.

“With AWS, we can rapidly experiment at lower costs and push the successful experiments into production faster, allowing us to improve the experience for existing customers and attract new ones.”

Old Mutual will be building a data lake on AWS, known as the Information Fabric, which will provide a single, consistent view of a customer’s information across the entire business platforms. Using Information Fabric, Old Mutual is also in the process of refining its MyOldMutual customer portal to give customers a view of their entire financial portfolio in one place at any time.

“Financial services organizations are turning to AWS because we offer them the broadest capabilities, best performance, and highest levels of security,” said Andy Isherwood, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, Amazon Web Services.

“For nearly two centuries, Old Mutual has been trusted by people across Africa. By moving off rigid, legacy technologies to flexible and scalable cloud technologies on AWS, Old Mutual will continue to maintain trust and delight their customers by offering more personalized services.”

Old Mutual is also looking to explore other AWS machine learning (ML) technologies, including Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, and Amazon Personalize, a real-time personalization and recommendation service.