🎙Hind Mechbal : The Digital Transformation On Its Way

The digital transformation of the CCR Group is well and truly on its way! A number of major projects were indeed completed in 2021, enabling us to:

• Provide our underwriters, managers and business lines in general with powerful tools to facilitate their daily work and automate the tasks that can be automated;
• Make the user experience more fluid, whether working in the office or from home;
• Strengthen our technological fundamentals and modernise our working tools.

In terms of public reinsurance

CCR has offered its ceding companies the opportunity to use its APIs to retrieve detailed information on published natural disaster decrees in an automated fashion.

We also continued to enhance and modernise the interactive map provided to our ceding companies on the ‘Pro Portal’, which enables them to visualise hazards and claims, and to invest in data processing automation to derive maximum value for the group and its clients.

The IT department also worked hand in hand with the public reinsurance modelling teams to modernise our server cluster in terms of hardware, operating system, software, development technologies and continuous integration.

“CCR GROUP’S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION COMES WITH A MODERNISATION OF OUR WORKING METHODS AND AGILE CULTURE.” Hind MECHBAL (Chief Information Officer at CCR Re)

In terms of market reinsurance

The objective of upgrading our reinsurance ERP is currently one of the major areas of investment. In fact, we implemented the first major technological modernisation of our reinsurance system by introducing a seamless user experience for contract management, based on web technologies, and offering efficiency gains for our managers.

In addition, we continued to automate the retrieval and entry of accounting documents by integrating a major new broker into this automation, which has enabled us to reach more than 20% of automated processing in 2021. These gains were achieved through investments in text mining and artificial intelligence technologies. The percentage of automation will continue to increase in 2022.

We are also making progress on the automated retrieval and entry of reinsurance treaties. This work based on NLP artificial intelligence is underway, and we expect to achieve major efficiency gains for our clients.

In the area of customer relationship management (CRM), we successfully met the challenge of providing our underwriters with a new, modern and efficient market tool, enabling them to better monitor the business relationship with our ceding companies and brokers. This project was implemented in a record time of six months, with a strong involvement of the business lines, the IT department and our partners.

On the regulatory and financial front, we successfully implemented the first phase of IFRS 17, and we are continuing to work actively with IT, the business lines and partners to move forward with the second phase of the project, which is scheduled for the end of 2022, with the aim of going live in early 2023.

“DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS A TOOL FOR DATA QUALITY.”

     Isabelle BION (Chief Operations Officer at CCR Re)

Working methods and working spaces

For this company digital transformation to take place, it is essential to support it with a transformation of working methods and a flexible culture. In 2021, and despite the health crisis, we stepped up employee training on the Agile and DevOps methods, flexibly reinforcing our management and collaboration methods, whether remotely or in person where possible, and relying on adapted collaboration tools. We also launched a project to modernise our development chain and continuous CI/CD integration of our reinsurance management software to shorten our IT lead times and to identify and test possible automations to achieve this.

We worked with the Group’s Executive Committee members to prioritise IT requirements and initiatives based on the value they bring to the business, allowing for a flexible alignment of strategic business needs with IT execution.

We also took advantage of the rather peculiar context of this year, when our employees were often working from home, to redesign office workspaces, and transform them into modern, open spaces, with the creation of isolation, meeting and co-creation areas. This is to foster a new hybrid and collaborative way of working that promotes well-being at work while combining it with productivity and team spirit.

Last but not least, in the context of 2021, with cyber risk increasing dramatically, we continued our work to improve the security of the company’s information system and strengthen the means of protection. In addition, we continued to modernise the company’s various working tools, including time and attendance management tools, accounting management tools, cash flow management tools, dashboards and decision-making tools, etc.

All these projects were carried out in 2021 in a hybrid and flexible working context, thanks to the strong commitment and collaboration of the business and IT teams.