Generali: Building the next-generation insurance company with Google Cloud

Generali, a company with 190 years of history, constantly looks to the future. It wants to become the “Lifetime Partner” of its customers, putting them in the center of the company’s strategy. To continue its leadership in the insurance industry, it wanted to take full advantage of data—especially from Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as car black boxes and smart home devices, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), smart analytics, and process digitization.

Generali is one of the largest global insurance and asset management providers. Established in 1831, it is present in 50 countries in the world, with a total premium income of € 70.7 billion in 2020. With more than 72,000 employees serving 65.9 million customers, the Group has a leading position in Europe and a growing presence in Asia and Latin America.

Even though it has such a long history of success, Generali is not resting on its laurels. While the group’s profit and market position are enviable, margins are being squeezed and long-term growth can’t be taken for granted. Instead, it’s investing in next-generation computing platforms to speed up innovation and improve its competitive posture.

The partnership with Google moves forward Generali's strategic ambition to be a Lifetime Partner during the important moments of people's lives. In combining Generali's skills with Google Cloud, the Group will develop insurance solutions with innovative and technologically advanced services. Generali wants to offer a high-quality, customized experience to its retail and corporate customers.

Maintaining the human touch with technology

As insurance products become increasingly commoditized, Generali’s strategy is to maintain the human touch—augmented by technology—to position itself as a lifetime partner to its customers in a way that’s unique in the insurance industry and, in the process, put it ahead of its competition for good. For example, Generali customers who have their cars equipped with a “black box” IoT device can get proactive support in the event of an accident and personalized premiums based on driving habits.

To advance this strategy focusing on the importance of customer experience, Generali needed to make a huge leap in innovation. Although it has been rated as “the best,” the company lags in business processes and infrastructure. For example, it was running its core operations from 23 separate on-premises data centers, each built by individual business units, which resulted in a lack of consistency across the group. Generali’s vision is to migrate most of its on-premises core business processes to the cloud to achieve global consistency in applications and processes for the first time.

Driving the future with smart analytics and AI

In getting started on its cloud journey, Generali identified data management, smart analytics, and AI as key technologies to add the human touch to its customer experience, improve internal processes, and give it the tools it needs to handle nearly any business challenge.

Generali selected Google Cloud for a key initiative: mission-critical compliance with a new accounting standard, IFRS 17, which will completely change the financial model for insurance companies globally. With Google Cloud as a partner, Generali knew it could build an end-to-end data management and smart analytics solution with cloud-native tools to unlock the potential of the finance data it already collects and drive its modernized customer experience.

The new accounting standard, which goes into effect on January 1, 2023, requires insurance companies to make complex financial simulations to calculate the future value of their contracts. “We can’t consider doing this manually. It would be too prone to human error,” says Paolo Rubano, Finance Transformation Director at Generali. He says that by automating the entire process, Generali can gain a competitive advantage. “We’re bringing data science into the financial world in a way that others may not be thinking about.”

What really impressed Generali was Google Cloud’s exceptional commitment to help it manage the risk of its cloud migration and its willingness to answer questions. Rubano says, “Google Cloud’s commitment to supporting us was far above the others. With Google Cloud, we get the human touch first, then the technology. This is so important for us. Now we can easily design a business road map and leapfrog our competitors by a few years.”

A cloud-first road map

Generali is well along a path to becoming a true data-driven organization with global solutions designed to enable the whole group to transform for operational excellence and high performance.

To get where it is today, Generali and Google Cloud established an innovation lab to incubate new solutions and customer services across the group. Generali IT professionals get intensive training on the technologies and skills of the future such as AI/ML, and the two companies collaborate on idea generation to co-design and co-develop new solutions for the insurance market. Using Google Cloud AI technologies like AutoML and AutoML Vision, Generali has already put more than 80 predictive models into production.

To lay the foundation for its modernized processes, Generali is consolidating critical workloads from its on-premises data centers to Google Cloud through a new IT joint venture it recently launched with Accenture called Group Operation Service Platform (GOSP). This is a massive program that will define a cloud adoption strategy to support global consistency.

GOSP solutions help the Generali Group establish more centralized governance, improve operational efficiencies, cut costs, improve profitability, and enhance service quality to meet the expectations of customers, agents, and employees. GOSP is also enabling Generali to build the end-to-end data management and smart analytics capabilities it needs in order to quickly develop, test, and deploy important use cases.

An early example of GOSP success is Generali’s new Insurance in a Box platform, which is designed to support emerging markets with a consistent platform for running core insurance processes. The solution is running in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and it will soon be available for all of Generali’s Latin American markets.

Smart automation to increase efficiency

To help Generali employees focus more time on high-value work, the company is using Google Cloud AI/ML tools to automate repetitive or complex processes with solutions such as virtual assistants to help customers access the Generali knowledge base and automated claims processing.

The new IFRS 17 regulation is pushing both companies to quickly develop an innovative solution for predictive analytics by running complex, multidimensional “what-if” scenarios with ML models developed in Google Cloud. The solution will not only help Generali comply with IFRS 17, it may also help the company unlock value hidden within the new regulation.

Generali selected SAP Financial Product Subledger hosted on Google Cloud to run the system. To meet the goal of comprehensive automation, the new system will include an AI chatbot to prompt users for input.

Transforming customer experience with computer vision, big data, and IoT

Generali is targeting automation as a key to improving the customer experience, and its new service to settle simple auto accident claims makes the process fast and easy. The policyholder simply uploads claim information and photos of the damage, and the AI-automated process estimates the value of the claim and delivers a cash settlement quickly.

This solution—a two-year development journey that combined the best of Generali and Google Cloud expertise—uses Cloud AutoML, AutoML Vision, and Google’s innovative Tensor Processing Unit (Cloud TPU), a specialized microprocessor designed to meet the intense demands of processing complex ML models with millions of parameters. The ability to handle these processing demands would have been impossible just a few years ago. Today, Google Cloud is among the very few platforms that offer a feature like Cloud TPU.

Davide Consiglio, Head of Advanced Analytics at Generali Italia, says, “Thanks to the effective collaboration with Google Cloud, we are now able to better serve our customers in one of the most critical moments of their life with us: a car incident. Our AI-based solutions allow a smooth, reliable, and immediate solution to the customer problem, introducing a new, innovative way to settle simple claims directly through a bank transfer from us to the customers. The solution is especially attractive for younger customers who prefer the freedom to repair their car anytime, anywhere, instead of locking the car into a bodyshop when the incident happens.”

Generali’s broader adoption of big data and IoT also opens opportunities such as the ability to offer usage-based insurance models enabled by IoT devices in cars and homes. This approach will reduce risk for insurance companies, cut the volume of claims, and create new opportunities to develop customer relationships to put Generali at the forefront of the insurance industry. Automotive “connected policies” use IoT data to calculate a premium based on a customer’s driving habits. Auto owners can save on premiums and also get access to convenient mobility services via an app or the Generali contact center, triggered by trip and event analytics gathered by the IoT devices. Similar solutions for the home are now in production, with smart home technology to help protect customers’ homes and raise the quality of service.

To take advantage of more opportunities to leverage IoT data to improve policy cost and service, Generali and Google Cloud are co-developing a next-generation IoT platform through Jeniot, Generali’s IoT company, which recently launched a pan-European mobility platform. A Google Cloud streaming solution will capture and manage the IoT data, which will be analyzed to improve predictive models for policy pricing and its digital mobility services.

Resilience is no accident

During its long history, Generali has weathered two world wars, and the company continued to service its contracts and support its communities despite economic hardships. Today, Generali is building on its rich tradition of resilience through technology, and its pace of innovation has increased significantly thanks to its collaboration with Google Cloud. “It’s surprising how we can accelerate now,” says Rubano. “It’s not a matter of years. Now it’s a matter of months, even weeks to close a project and quickly move on to the next one.” He says the “tunnel effect” of working on massive projects for years is now in the past. As an example, Generali quickly developed a cloud-based Digital Desk in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving its global proprietary sales force the ability to sell policies remotely.

Generali now has a technology stack to support its business road map and it has the skills and tools to build it out.

By collaborating with Google Cloud, Generali can continue to be the best insurance company in the world as well as a lifetime partner that customers can count on for another 190 years.