Navy Mutual shares its digital transformation journey

At the 2023 InsurTechNY Spring conference, Peter Meyers, the vice president of solutions and technology at Navy Mutual spoke during a session on March 30, titled “Journey of a Full Digital Refresh at Navy Mutual.” His Ted-style talk outlined the life insurer’s approach to digital transformation and the challenges faced throughout the process.

Meyers explained that he knew that every existing process would need to be assessed and analyzed to achieve a high-tech vision for the company. He noted that, as a starting point, security and protection of digital systems was a crucial step in the digital refresh.

“When I first came on board, one of the first things we started with was cybersecurity. That’s foundational for everything that comes after it,” Meyers said. “[As a] risk-averse life insurance company, we needed to have that in place to make sure that we can build on that, especially as we transition to cloud services.”

With a strong internal team overseeing the protection of the insurer’s cybersecurity measures, Navy Mutual moved forward to performing additional assessments throughout the company’s digital ecosystem.

“One of the things we did was, we broke that process up into the old adage, ‘People, process and technology,’ in that order. We made sure that we had key people internally, changed some of the hiring practices…” Meyers said. “So we were able to take… new approaches. We also broke out the consulting group into a special life and annuity group that was able to ramp up and ramp down and we brought new technology vendors in…” 

In Navy Mutual’s assessment, 99 systems were identified as key technologies, but presented a challenge as “each had been implemented over different years and at different points,” stated Meyers. The disjointed technological ecosystem presented many challenges, Meyers added. The insurer was left to determine how to best approach the overall transformation.

“So being able to transform into the high tech [vision] that we wanted to achieve, we basically had two options. One, we could go with one of the large well-known providers, someone we’ve worked with in the past that has a full ecosystem. As you see, it’s the safer option – proven technologies, big guys use it, but we’d be a small fish in a very big pond. We’d have to make sure we can adapt to those processes. The other option, which is something that was seen as risky… is having an integration strategy.”

Meyers explained that, after weighing these two different options, the company eventually decided on the latter. 

“We finally got very comfortable with the idea of having an integration strategy and really focusing on the best in class [applications], keeping a flexible approach, which means we could start with that integration strategy… And then we started with the search for those best in class applications…then we decided we could implement all those systems over a 12 month period.”

He emphasized the importance of strategizing and planning. Navy Mutual is currently ongoing still in its implementation period. Meyers concluded the session by highlighting the significance of adaptability and flexibility during this period of change, which can and will likely present unexpected challenges. 

“Some of the overall vision changes [include] adaptability. I think this is basic, but it gives you an idea of the starting point. We have people that go to conferences and come back and [say] ‘This is a great API integration…’ Bringing the vendor and process experts in, having the right people, hiring externally nationwide and really building up an internal team to support the processes will create that vision and manage those external resources.”