Ingrid de Swart (a.s.r.): ‘Technology Must Be Innovative but Also Manageable’
Ingrid de Swart, CTO/COO of a.s.r, proves that not only a degree in law, economics or business administration allows access to the boardroom. She embarked on her career as a communications advisor at Delta Lloyd with a degree in Dutch language and literature. She knows all the works of poets P.C. Hooft and Joost van den Vonde. At the insurance company, she swiftly worked her way up to managerial level and joined the board of directors in 2014. ‘My eagerness to learn has stood me in good stead. Besides my work, I attended a host of additional courses,' she explains. ‘I was also enormously driven to, together with the right people, ensure that defined objectives were achieved.’
De Swart chose a career in insurance because she was committed to making a difference in her work: for employees, customers and society. 'Financial services seemed logical to me. Every Dutch person wants to manage their money well, and to protect themselves against major, unaffordable risks.’ She remembers her entrance into the financial sector well, now 25 years ago. 'We were at the beginning of major change processes. What is now taken as totally for granted, did not even play a role at that time. We had only one single computer with internet access in the department.’
In 2019, De Swart joined a.s.r. as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operations Officer. In this combined management position, she is responsible for the digital agenda and commercial activities at the insurance company. While she relies heavily on the expertise of IT specialists, she also wants to understand the technology herself. To this end, she learned to program on a self-built Raspberry Pi, a minicomputer about the size of a credit card.
Before joining a.s.r., De Swart worked at Aegon Netherlands. Because of the merger of the two companies, she finds her work even more special. ‘I now have the privilege of tying the two companies together,’ she explains to Stijn Viaene, professor of digital transformation and partner at Vlerick Business School. It results in an animated discussion in which De Swart and Viaene turn out to have a surprising amount of common ground.
How do you define your role as CTO? What is your view on the role that technology plays within a.s.r.?
‘Technology is essential as it allows our business to be scalable. It is my job to ensure that our technology is not only innovative, but also remains manageable in all respects. Over the past few years, I have delved deeply into the technology from our former back offices, but also into software as a service solutions (SaaS) that we have been outsourcing to our partners.
a.s.r. made a conscious decision to manage and develop the customer portal itself, because this is the place where we interact with our customers. I of course rely on the expertise of IT professionals. But I also trained myself to be able to understand the technology in general terms. I also speak regularly to people both inside and outside a.s.r. about how the technology will develop in the future.’
You seem like a curious person. How curious are the a.s.r. employees? And is curiosity a key factor for a successful digital transformation?
‘Without curious people, it is difficult to transform as an organization. Therefore, we find curiosity hugely important. But employees cannot be endlessly fascinated. In the run-up to the digital transformation, it was quite a dilemma how to maintain curiosity in your organization while also making progress. We refrained from formulating rigid rules but did embrace five principles. This helped in encouraging people to participate in building creative solutions. It also made it clear that procedural steps are necessary.’
Can you share more about these principles with us?
One of them is: no congratulations without customer validation. In the past, fantastic systems were built which ended up not getting adopted by customers. We now force ourselves to pilot all our ideas in advance by using customer panels. A second principle is that the independent intermediaries who sell our products should have visibility into how the customer uses our online services. We do not want our independent advisers to feel bypassed. For example, another principle is: to the customer we are one a.s.r. These principles guide employees in dealing with dilemmas.’
If I were to interview a random employee at your company, could they explain with clarity why a digital transformation is important?
'We invested a huge amount of energy and time into communicating the digital agenda and its principles. I think many colleagues are familiar with it. It is also noticeable - when I started five years ago, that only 18 per cent of our customers were digital, currently 55 per cent are. But there are also employees and customers who are less comfortable with this process. There would of course always be the possibility for them to speak to a person, especially when there is a serious issue - when there has been an accident or a problem with a pension payment, for example.’
With the rise of generative AI, we have already entered another wave of digital transformation. In your view, what is the impact of AI and how does it relate to your digital transformation?
‘Generative AI is no hype. It is incredibly interesting and impactful. I find it positive that this new technology is reinvigorating our organization. We need to keep innovating and transforming. We are benefiting enormously from the fact that we have already invested significantly in digital transformation. We are busy working on how to use AI for work and processes that can have real impact. A relatively large group within a.s.r. is getting the chance to explore possibilities with a co-pilot. We are investing heavily in speech-to-text applications. For instance, we record customer conversations in our contact center and summarize these with the help of AI. This is a more efficient way - employees no longer need to make notes in the files themselves. It also provides insights about customers, which we can use to improve the customer journey.'
How is the cooperation between IT and the other departments organized?
‘Our health insurance company is very advanced in this area. They have teams combining both operational and IT functions. This means that the people and technology factors work together. It is remarkably successful. This way of working allows customers to increasingly arrange things themselves in their own digital environment. At the same time, it helps our staff in the contact center: they have less administrative work after a conversation. This administrative work happens automatically. They can focus on the quality of the contact with the customer.’
How do these teams work together?
‘Our business-specific teams - who deal with healthcare insurance, for example - work with organization-wide teams. These include data scientists and data analysts, but also people whose work it is to make sure new developments are brought into production. They ensure for instance that the right APIs (application programming interface, ed.), privacy guarantees and all necessary tests are in place before something goes live. This collaboration between business and IT allows us to learn how to roll out this process in other parts of our business.’
Can you give a concrete example of how a.s.r. deploys AI-technology?
‘Employees in our health insurance company are currently spending a lot of time writing emails to customers. Therefore, we are now developing our own language model that will help employees to find answers and will enable them to draft e-mails quickly and comprehensibly.
AI has also proved to be valuable in our SP processes. We noticed that about 5 per cent of cases could not be processed. In the past, we would have simply accepted this. Thanks to AI, we are analyzing this 5 per cent. We found the reason to be that many customers were submitting illness claims from abroad, having visited a doctor while they were on holiday. Those documents did not fit into our administration, which explained the dropout.
A generative AI tool can read and interpret this, which means we can now also process a sizable proportion of foreign claims. To me this is a wonderful example of how generative AI sometimes leads you down unexpected paths.'
Do you see a.s.r. as a frontrunner in the digital transformation?
'I rather see us as a fast follower. This is a conscious choice. As a no-nonsense company, we first want to properly understand an innovative product. We carefully assess whether something will indeed generate value. Moreover, we want to use the resources entrusted to us wisely.’
As a fast follower, which companies are you watching?
‘Mainly to companies from outside our industry. Think of consumer companies such as Bol.com and Amazon. We also closely follow the software that Microsoft develops.
In addition, we are talking to other sectors, such as accounting, to learn how they deal with recent technology. Of course, we keep an eye on our competitors.'
How do digitization and sustainability merge?
'Initially, digitization seemed to be the solution to save paper, shipping and transport costs. Later, we realized that data centers have a tremendous impact on the environment. We are now working closely with our partners to be CO2 neutral or even CO2 negative by 2030. For us, sustainability goes beyond reducing environmental impact. It is also about inclusion. For instance, we put a huge amount of effort into making our website accessible for people with visual or other disabilities. We are also working on closing the gap between the digitally and non-digitally literate. We work every day to make and keep everything accessible. That is complicated. I do not have the silver bullet. But we do constantly keep delving into the issue and the developments around it.’
What do you see as the biggest challenge for the coming years?
‘That is to ensure that technological developments remain manageable. Both for customers and employees. A disturbing number of young people are currently having mental problems. They have the feeling that they are always on by ever-increasing digitalization. It is a huge challenge to deal with this responsibly. Technology’s possibilities are vast, but employees also need to be comfortable with it. We therefore think carefully about how to gain more from technology, but also what that means for our employees. At the contact center, we use AI to summarize calls. An employee no longer needs to do this. But often this administrative task was a welcome break which provided variety. It is enormously intensive to continually deal with phone calls. We are therefore looking closely at the content of work packages and how we can bring that variety into the work in a different way.’
Do you see any parallels between your background in linguistics and the digital world?
'Absolutely. Just like learning a language, the digital world is about recognizing patterns. We still position AI as a kind of trainee alongside the employee, but we can see that AI is getting bigger and bigger, especially in the field of knowledge management. It is about how we learn to interact with and manage this technology. And in doing so, it is important to not make the technology too complex. Just as with language, technology that is too complex will be harder to embrace. The challenge is to make digital transformation meaningful for people.'
This interview was published in Management Scope 08 2024.
This article was last changed on 24-09-2024