IA Financial Group

Founded in 1892, iA Financial Group offers a comprehensive range of life and health insurance products, savings and retirement plans, mutual and segregated funds, securities, auto and home insurance, mortgages and car loans as well as a host of other financial products and services.
Responsible for the administration and management of over $172.9 billion in assets, our publicly-listed company ranks among Canada’s largest and most prominent insurance companies. Thanks to our conservative investment policy, wise capital management practices and solid risk management culture, iA Financial Group enjoys financial stability and flexibility, which allows it to grow and withstand any potential economic shocks.

Clients

Employees

Methodology

Business Issue

In 2014, iA undertook a major transformation project within the Mortgage Services Organization. There was a need for a detailed assessment of all areas of the group from system utilisation, processes and resource requirements to determine the best utilization and alignment of their current assets. They required an end-to-end visibility and understanding of the current operations. This understanding would provide them with the ability to plan and implement the new operating model within the Mortgage Services area.
Additionally in 2015, iA management mandated a detailed review of the corporate approach and policy for enterprise risk management that were till then siloed and part of each individual lines of business and subsidiaries. The end result of this extensive but critical exercise would be a centralised process based unified risk management framework that would provide insight into the organisations operations from a risk perspective.

Solution

IA chose to use Interfacing’s Enterprise Process Center (EPC) for the Mortgage Services transformation project. The EPC solution provided the transformation team with the tools necessary to visualize the current operating model which included the processes, systems, resources, and KPI’s.
All processes with the Mortgage Services operation were mapped with all associated artefacts, such as roles, responsible, documents, input and outputs, KPI’s. IA was able to visualize the end-to-end view of their processes with all system touchpoints. Further to the analysis, IA was able to make an informed decision on the implementation of new application and the desired operating model.
This first project within iA, demonstrated the value of visualization of the current model. It was decided that the EPC would be extended for all compliance and process improvement programs. A Process Center of Excellence was created to assist all business units with transformation or improvement projects. As the complete Business Architecture of the organization was now stored in a central repository, iA once again decided to use the EPC with its advanced functionalities as the solution for building the enterprise-wide business process repository and the risk management framework to address this business critical issue. This project had a major impact on the company since they had to update the corporate approach and policy for risk management.
The Enterprise Process Center® is an end-to-end business process lifecycle management solution that is fully aligned with the newly evolving concept of the “Business Operating System” encompassing the Enterprise Business Process Analysis (EBPA), Performance Monitoring and
Operations Intelligence (OI) linking important organizational elements such as strategy, processes, people, systems and technology as key drivers of success.

Business Value

The EPC solution provided the much needed Performance Monitoring and Operations Intelligence, two business critical components of the “Business Operating System” model to provide the business leaders of iA with tools to effectively monitor and manage their business operations, adapt to moving strategic targets, and measure business outcomes over time.
The project not only met the business objectives but delivered immense value to iA. The business users were now able to visualise processes end-to-end, optimize operational activities, identify and eliminate redundancy, integrate risks and controls with business processes, track KPIs, was the single source of business process knowledge, used for internal training and facilitate compliance certification.

Methodology

Since the project was complex and was spread across all lines of business and subsidiaries, the Project team comprised of Process Architects, Business Analysts, Risk Analysts, Subject Matter Experts, IT Experts from iA and experienced Business Process Consultants from Interfacing Technologies. They jointly worked in the various phases of the project designing the unified Process Architecture that was aligned to link the “Strategy-to-Execution” use case of the EBPA, developped the unified Risk Management framework, performed Business Process Analysis, Process Re-design, Process Standardization and Content Migration.