Insurance provider FWD Group has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a five-year cloud agreement as part of the company's ongoing cloud migration.
AWS is already FWD's strategic cloud provider, and the agreement will see AWS continue to host the company's core business applications including finance, customer, and insurance agent interfaces.
The agreement covers FWD's progressive migration away from operating its on-site data centers.
Sandeep Pandey, group chief technology and operations officer of FWD Group, said: “At FWD, cloud computing is a holistic business strategy, not just a priority for the technology function. This digital-first mindset has delivered operational infrastructure and capabilities that are not only secure and cloud-based, but also fully integrated across business functions and with valued partners like AWS.
"With these foundations in place, we can now further scale our generative artificial intelligence (AI) deployment in an efficient, effective, and responsible way, in line with our vision of changing the way people feel about insurance.”
By the end of 2023, FWD has migrated 97 percent of its applications to the cloud, an increase of 70 percent from the end of 2020.
Francessca Vasquez, VP of professional services and generative artificial intelligence innovation center, AWS, said: "AWS has been supporting companies in the financial and insurance industry around the world to better serve their customers with its cloud and AI technologies for more than a decade. FWD Group's ambition of harnessing the power of cloud and generative AI demonstrates their commitment to digital transformation and customer-centricity."
Between 2021 and 2023, FWD trained more than 600 employees in cloud fluency, gaining the AWS Skills Guild. FWD began its cloud migration to provide a foundation for generative AI deployment. The company now has 200 active AI models applied across its business, either currently or set to in the future assist with acquisition, marketing, channel and agent performance, underwriting, claims, and customer service.
FWD Group is a pan-Asian life insurance business supporting 13 million customers in 10 markets. The company was launched in 2013, and began its "AI Journey" in 2019.
While the company has selected AWS as its 'strategic cloud provider', in February 2024 FWD also extended a partnership with Microsoft for four years to gain access to "the latest generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations."
Insurance providers migrating to the cloud is increasingly common. Last month Nib Group completed a 95 percent migration to AWS, and in February 2023 Zurich Insurance Group announced plans to move its IT infrastructure to AWS.
This year also saw insurance company Great Eastern migrate 300 databases to on-premise Oracle Cloud Infrastructure hardware - Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer.
