The AI roadmap: What can we learn from Storebrand’s digital journey?

Technological innovation has been imperative for all businesses trying to keep up with competition; uprooting legacy systems to replace them with more efficient processes. As financial services are getting to grips with evolving technologies, how can business leaders build the future of the company while avoiding disruption and ensuring its resilience long-term? We spoke to Arne Martin Moen, Chief Operating Officer at Storebrand, to discuss:

• The company’s digitisation journey
• The goals they’re aiming to achieve short-term and long-term
• The challenges they encountered and how they overcame them
• And the successes they’ve enjoyed.

Could you tell me about Storebrand’s approach to achieving data efficiency and innovation?

We’ve been working on this for quite some time. When I started 10 years ago, we began an enterprise consolidation process to get rid of old legacy setups and make a better front-to-back platform. You’re never really done with this, but we got quite far down the line.

In 2020, we migrated all our infrastructure to the cloud. We were probably one of the first asset management companies globally who moved all our servers and technology stack into cloud. This was completed in 2021.

At the same time, we also brought in a new data platform into the cloud and migrated out of the old legacy technology. We started that in the asset management part of the business but we’re part of a group – Storebrand Group – which has also moved into the same setup.

We’ve been working very hard over the past five years to lift the whole platform and make use of all the tools the cloud and new technology allows. This gave us a great foundation and a lot more possibilities in thinking, innovation, digital processes, automation, efficiency, scalability and more! We can see that we’re at the forefront of technology development and we’re attracting more talent because of that.

Storebrand Group also has a large digital organisation which we benefit from. Everyone from the bottom to the top level are thinking about how we can be more digital. How can we use technology to gain an advantage? How can we improve client interactions and sales processes? I think that’s very much at the heart of what we do.

You mentioned one of the benefits you have after this 10 year process is that you’re better positioned in the market against competitors for talent. Is that the goal you had when you started off?

No, but it is a positive side effect.

The goal was to get to a more modern platform to set ourselves up for scalability. We were growing and we knew that we needed get rid of the old legacy systems to allow for the business to scale. We wanted a platform that would set us up for our future – for further innovation and digitisation. Yes, we are attracting more talent, but we are also getting endless possibilities in building new things with APIs.

We’re also able to interact with clients in a very different way. For example, clients don’t want reports sent to them; they want to subscribe to the data. With the cloud and our technology partners, we’re able to position ourselves to give our clients what they want.

So what are you building now?

We’re focusing a lot on the client experience side. We want to be able to interact with our clients in the best possible ways – whether that’s through reports, data or analytics. How we communicate is very important.

But we’re also trying to be more scalable, meaning that we can add more volumes and more products. We could grow faster without having to hire new people; build a larger organisation with our existing resources. We could come out with new products in the market without having to hire a whole new team or change setups or platforms. I think this is why scalability and efficiency are so important.

What were the biggest challenges you had to overcome during roll-out?

The cloud migration was a challenge because no one had done it before, so it was very difficult in terms of culture and getting people on board. They’ve been working on the old systems for many years, so getting everyone on the same track was a big challenge. The technology was still new, while the finance industry is based on old technology and old processes. There were a lot of changes that had to be made in order to adapt and actually make use of the new technology.

There was also the challenge of getting the whole platform to run efficiently. There was not a lot of experience out there because of how new it was, so we had to learn a lot as we went along.

How do you address something like a cultural change? How did you help your colleagues and your leadership team through that?

It’s about a lot of training and giving them the opportunity to learn and to be at the forefront.

It’s also about storytelling – it’s not what you lose, it’s what you get. It’s about trying to get people to understand why it’s going to be better for work and how they can become more relevant in the market. There were a lot of things we had to do to gradually get them to get rid of the old and think new – to make them want to be a part of that journey. So we spent a lot of time on giving them the tools they wanted and needed.

Did that mean a continuous comms line with colleagues to understand their needs, delivering and then troubleshooting?

Yes, but we also showed them live examples of how things can work, how much faster the new way is, and how easy it is to get the data. We gave them tangible results where they could see the technology works much better than the legacy systems did.

We spoke a little bit about future goals but what does that look like when implemented? What sort of technologies are you looking at?

We’re looking at a bit of a mix. It’s about the basic things, right? For example, improving the client portals so we can have simple solutions and automations, so we don’t have to process things manually. The whole client journey needs to be seamless, there needs to be less friction and it needs to be digital because that’s what people are used to now.

We’re also looking into AI and how it can be utilised to support clients – like a chat interface where they can ask questions about their data, their portfolios, reports, policy documents, fund documents, etc. We’re piloting that currently, along with some internal pilots on how we can streamline processes using AI.

A lot of people are trying to get a grasp of how they could implement AI. What do you think are the key benefits and the greatest challenges to that?

There’s a lot of talk about AI and a lot of that culminates in the use of Copilot in Office or using some sort of ChatGPT interface. That’s good; it works, and it gives you some efficiency. But everyone else is using it as well, so you don’t get any competitive advantage by implementing these kinds of standard tools. It’s all about putting aside enough time and resources to go and try to do something new. You need to do a lot of testing.

You can build, measure, learn or fail fast, but what we’ve done here is that we sat down as a team of five to draw up our ultimate goal for the future. We want to have an operational assistant that can “tap us on the shoulder” and tell us things like “There seems to be a break between your bank and your core system. It could be because you have not updated the tax documentation in Mexico”. It would be cool if we had something like that which could nudge us towards fixing things. That’s the long-term goal.

To start though, we asked ourselves – what could we do? How can we start this journey? What are the options? With technology like cloud, Open AI APIs, Python frameworks and everything that we have, we could build a prototype. So we created an AI tool that learns the database of the core system, so you can ask for whatever and it returns the data.

Then we hooked it onto another system to learn all the fund orders which come through as PDFs. We combined the two and asked it to check whether the fund orders are reflected correctly in the system. So it picks up the PDF, finds the data in the core system, and tells you if it’s a match or not. And if it’s not a match then you should check why it’s not matching. This probably saves us 25 hours a month in manual work – it’s not a lot but it’s a good first step.

We’ve proven that we can do this and we’ve started our journey towards the operational assistant that could tap us on the shoulder to tell us “There’s a mismatch between these numbers. You should check it with the fund company or in the system”. It’s all about taking those baby steps with small teams to try and do small things – see what works. What doesn’t. And then build on from there.

To conclude, we talked about innovation, culture, technology, but I’m sure there’s a lot to your role we haven’t discussed. With that in mind, what are you looking forward to the most at IMpower FundForum?

AI discussions. I think it’s interesting to hear what other people are doing and to share ideas and get people to reflect on them. I’m also very interested in everything about digital assets, blockchain, and next-level processing. It’s difficult but definitely important.

Operating model discussions will be key as well with all the changes in technology. We’ve been talking a lot about insourcing versus outsourcing. We’ve insourced everything – built everything in-house, but what’s the next step? Should we start buying packages and services rather than hire? There’s a lot in the operational space that is very interesting. There are a lot of different routes that we can take, so what are people thinking? Where are they going? And what’s on their radar? What should we be aware of? Definitely excited to hear about this at IMpower FundForum.

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