[This is a sponsored article with AIA Malaysia.]
For many industries in this digital day and age, if you snooze, you lose.
As almost 86% of global insurers believe that they must innovate at an increasingly rapid pace to retain a competitive edge, AIA Malaysia is all-in for the race to become an organisation of the future in the insurance and takaful space, backed by technology, digital, and analytics (TDA).
An example of how they’ve been establishing themselves in the digital and tech space is the launch of AIA Vitality back in 2016, a science-backed health and wellness programme that empowers and rewards Malaysians to make healthy choices for their lives every day. Users linked their wearables to the AIA Vitality app to keep track of their physical activities and fitness levels, in addition to getting points for eating and resting well.
In the spirit of continuous evolution and improvement, this app has since been decommissioned. AIA Vitality’s features were integrated into MY AIA, a super app that enables AIA’s customers to perform a wide variety of functions including managing their policies, completing financial needs assessment and keeping track of their health, amongst others.
Of course, this barely scratches the surface of how they aim to grow into this increasingly digital and borderless landscape.
In meeting the changing demands and needs of consumers today, AIA Malaysia wants to hire 500 TDA talents over the next 3 years to fulfil its goals.
“Digitalisation has disrupted how we serve customers and how we work. With competition intensifying, our Life Planners are also expecting more digital capabilities to help them become more productive while keeping our customers engaged,” Gary Goh, Chief Technology Officer of AIA Malaysia shared with Vulcan Post. And that’s where the TDA initiative comes in.
If you are a cloud security engineer, digital solutions product manager, or data science manager, these are some examples of who AIA Malaysia wants to hire. There are many more vacancies available, you can look at the full list here.
Taking the lead on digitalisation
The demand for personalised service is on the rise. To cater to this demand, data analytics, AI, and automation are the main tools to deliver viable solutions. Take for example some of these key TDA players and the achievements of their departments:
- Part of what Ang Hooi Chen, a Data Modeller with IT Data Management, does is to extract and aggregate data to solve business challenges and identify business opportunities. In one project, her collaborators automated data flow and created data points to identify existing customers with protection gaps as well as agents with leadership potential.
- Enabling remote signatures on one of their sales platforms and streamlining the various AIA apps improved the UX for customers and life planners, according to Wong Loo Woon, an Associate Director with IT Infra Service Delivery & Operations.
- Clara Soon from IT Innovation & Digital Design uses corridor testing or usability testing as part of the design process to enable users to stay engaged with the MY AIA app. To keep track of app performance, they measure users’ success rate of completing the journeys and use in-app feedback to capture their pain points. They then made changes based on the feedback, resulting in the increment of an overall average user app rating from 2 to 4+ stars.
Joining a dynamic environment with a growth-focused mindset
Think you may have the chops to be part of AIA’s TDA talents but still want to know more? Hear talents’ experiences first-hand here:
Interested talents can expect a growth-oriented agenda in AIA, and current employees have described the working environment as fast-paced, agile, and ambitious.
Dennis Foo, an Associate Director of Digital Marketing and product owner of the MY AIA app, led the first agile-approach team to deliver digital customer initiatives in his third month with the organisation.
His daily to-dos included meetings with crucial business users to define the project’s development roadmap, SCRUM with the development team to work out daily tasks, followed by meetings covering analytics report and sprint work reviews plus media planning sessions.
Dennis representing participants in the Global Institute For Tomorrow leadership programme, handing a token of appreciation to Dr. Madhu (aka. Teddy Bear Doctor) for advisory on matters relating to KL’s urban poor / Image Credit: AIA Malaysia 
The IT Consumer & Business Solutions team on a fun day out / Image Credit: AIA Malaysia
Kawthar Mohd Sulaiman, an Associate Director with IT Consumer & Business Solutions chimed about the role her team played to improve the claims processing experience. Before this, Customer Service frontliners had to calculate claims balances manually and then call customers back. Due to the varying products on the shelf, there wasn’t a single way to calculate this amount.
In order to free them from manual calculations and potential errors, this initiative required close collaboration between business users and IT to configure the product calculations in the system. Kawthar said, “It sounded easy… but it actually took a lot of learning about these products to ensure the calculations are correct.”
Managing the art and science of being a tech professional
To fulfil its TDA goals, AIA values talents with not only the capability to deliver key initiatives, but also those who can drive new ways of working, demonstrate leadership, as well as coach the team to deliver business impact.
Chin Sai Khuan, an Associate Director of Solution Architect / IT Architecture gave a lowdown of his role. He said, “I need to look at solution implementation from different perspectives which include technology, risks, scope, cost, quality, time, and resources involved in projects.”
And with many initiatives being executed concurrently, aspirants will have the opportunity to work with the various project teams to implement the right projects for the business.
Should you be on the Enterprise Integration team under Viknesh Veluchamy, you’ll be working as the middleware layer of the organisation to bridge the front-end and back-end office teams. “I always remind my team to apply an enterprise view which would help shape the final products and deliverables that will benefit both the end users and customers,” he added.
He was part of the team that delivered iPoS (the point of sales tool used by AIA Life Planners) and ALPA (AIA Life Planner App), which changed the way Life Planners do business. These apps allow them to do everything from setting appointments to submitting applications.
Harnessing digital capabilities to stay relevant and competitive
“We are set to transform and steer AIA Malaysia into the digital future, enabling us to upgrade our customer service, develop compelling propositions, make our distribution an even greater differentiator, and ultimately fulfil our purpose of helping Malaysians live healthier, longer, and better,” concluded Gary.
As they’re harnessing this TDA bandwagon, they’re hoping it would attract the brightest and most like-minded talents to be a part of this exciting journey.
- Find out more about joining the AIA Malaysia team here.
Featured Image Credit: AIA Malaysia
