Personal Finance Division
Old Mutual is the largest and most well-established financial services provider in Southern Africa. Their prominent position in the industry is reflected in their strong operating performance across all their businesses, their good balance sheet position, strong financial flexibility with demonstrated access to international capital markets and diversity of business. They offer a variety of financial products and services. These span investment, life assurance, asset management, banking, healthcare and general insurance. Their client base comprises of individuals, businesses, corporates & institutions. Old Mutual is a significant participant in the South African economy. They are committed to addressing Black Economic Empowerment and were actively involved in the drafting of the Financial Services Charter.
The Business Case
Old Mutual had created a software-based sales incentive scheme, called the 51 Club, to motivate their salespeople around the country. The scheme proved highly effective in providing their salespeople with a reward scheme for increased sales. However, the system was mainframe based and much of the input was paper based. In addition, staff had to manually check that details were correct. It was felt that an improved system would provide for greater flexibility and allow staff around the country to be able to access their data independently. At Old Mutual’s request, in 2003 ViaData replaced the old mainframe system with a custom developed Delphi client/server based application. Old Mutual later wanted to make the 51 Club purely web-based and integrate it with their web-based general sales incentive platform, Sparkfolios. In 2014, a full re-write of the 51 Club program was considered and ViaData was approached to provide a competing proposal.
The Catalyst™ Development Environment
ViaData recommended a Catalyst-based solution and was awarded the contract ahead of the competition. Using the Catalyst Agile approach and the tools and migration features available in Catalyst, ViaData re-developed the entire legacy system as a Catalyst based solution in the extremely short project time of 6 months, given the size of the project. Due to the focus on data over process, and the ease with which Catalyst was able to migrate the system, ViaData was able to develop the replacement application with almost no involvement from Old Mutual staff and without impacting on their very busy production schedules. Most notably, when it came to user testing, the entire end-to-end testing was undertaken by 2 users in just 3 days of dedicated testing. This rapid testing was primarily thanks to the fact that the entire Catalyst environment had been production proven over the previous 7 years. This meant that the only testing that was necessary was: • To confirm that 51 Club program business rules had been set correctly. • To confirm that the data migration was successful. It was noted and much appreciated by Old Mutual that ViaData responded rapidly to issues and that a stable system was efficiently created. The legacy 51 Club program system was migrated to a cloud-based, browser accessed system, hosted on a dedicated Microsoft Azure server and accessible from any location without first having to install client software (SaaS)*. Implementation went through with barely any issues and those that did arise were very quickly resolved. The new system was so user friendly and easy to navigate that training was accomplished by simply distributing several short tutorial training videos that were released using Catalyst’s integrated training platform. The migration was extremely successful and with over 4,000 registered users and approximately 700 unique logins per day, the new Catalyst based 51 Club system has been a huge success. *Software as a Service – Gmail is a good example.
Conclusion
The new 51 Club system has now been running since August 2015. The system has proved stable and reliable and has provided tangible and immediate benefits to Old Mutual. The 51 Club is now considered to be a prime motivator for Old Mutual sales staff and a fundamental part of its business.
Please read more about Catalyst™ here.
ViaData
ViaData has been working in the custom business application market since 1990, for more than 25 years. We know and understand business processes, business data and business impact very well. Our systems are currently in use in many industries across South Africa and have been tried and tested in real world situations successfully over many years. ViaData continually adds new functionality and features to our systems as technology improves and by customer request. All new features and functionality, no matter which client requests them, are rolled out to all our clients as part of our Service Level Agreement. We have much value to offer you in terms of our understanding of business issues, processes, the impact of new systems in business culture and our long pedigree of satisfied clients over more than a quarter of a century. To find out more, or to arrange a free, no-obligation demonstration,please contact us!
