The small market of Brunei has a healthy and competitive insurance sector – including a lucrative niche in Islamic insurance. We spoke to Takaful Brunei CEO Shahrildin Jaya to understand how digital transformation has been achieved and with what level of success.
“Takaful Brunei believes technology is an important enabler successfully to achieve its wider strategic objectives,” said Mr Jaya. The takaful provider developed a digital roadmap covering five main components:
Customer experience
“The customer experience component is crucially important as it feeds purpose and requirements into other milestone parts of the digital roadmap,” said Mr Jaya. “The focus on customer experience is to have technology to enable quick easy transactions for customers’ convenience. Critical operational efficiencies are required for the core policy servicing system including the satellite customer-facing systems such as claims servicing, mobile application, call centre, agency portal, website and social media platforms. This technology is also the first port of entry for collection of data to ensure quality data is captured for AI features.”
Internal work processes
“A workforce becomes productive when technology supports its daily tasks and activities,” said Mr Jaya. “As work processes require unique requirements subject to the business and market dynamics, the digital roadmap can identify work process gaps and specific technology can be deployed for the respective department, division, or unit to ensure their work processes output avoid any human resource wastage and are ultimately aligned with the wider strategic objectives.”
Compliance requirements
“Submission of current and increasing compliance requirements are naturally expected to respective authorities and regulators in line with both domestic and international standards,” said Mr Jaya. “Data warehousing and having the flexible ability to extract data for compliance submission is the minimum requirement.
“An added feature benefit is to have the data analysis not only to produce reports for past and current achievements but also produce predictive reports.”
Network and security
“As technology enables growth, ensuring its reliability is paramount,” said Mr Jaya. “Networking and having the ability between different platforms to be seamlessly integrated requires an increasing and demanding skillset to connect various internal and external stakeholders to be aligned. As technology is exposed to more stakeholders, enforcing the security measures are a relentless and vigilant exercise.”
Future technology
“The digital roadmap is an evolving document that will always be reviewed to evaluate how best future technology can be scalable and harnessed to enable the wider strategic objectives,” said Mr Jaya. “For example, with the recent pandemic development and imposed limitations, cloud technology has become more prominent enforcing reliability and security requirements that satisfy performances.”
Targets and deliverables
“Embarking on a digital transformation is a systematic and methodical approach specific to each company to serve its wider strategic objectives,” said Mr Jaya. “If a strategic objective is to maximise sales distribution through an agency model, then the technology is geared towards that.”
Three core components
“A successful digital transformation requires three items,” said Mr Jaya. “First, it requires critical analysis by review of its current technology standing by engaging with as many stakeholders to solicit both positive comments and criticisms of its current use of technology.
“Second, it requires vision by picturing the destination where the company should be at in three, five or 10 years. Subject to the vision and the strategic objective, sourcing the appropriate technology will follow suit.
“Third, it requires tenacity to be relentless to achieve the vision and continuous monitoring of the progress. With the three success factors, the company will then be able to prioritise and impose a timeline to meet. For example, if customer dissatisfaction is rampant, priority is given to technology solutions where appropriate and the timeline to resolve is urgent,” said Mr Jaya.
Continual process
“Digital transformation is an evolving process and is an instilled characteristic requirement for individuals to be vigilant in any organisation,” said Mr Jaya. “The individuals become the driving team for business growth that will plan, execute and monitor their respective teams’ actions and deliverables.” A