RSA chief uncans insurance giant's mega IT infrastructure review

'Outsourcing hasn't worked,' says Price in new drive to digitise

Cloud at heart

“We want to build out the layers of the of the architecture that will give us some short-term capabilities. Rating and pricing takes three months to put a change in, in Canada. We should be able to do it like that [Price snaps his fingers].”

Cloud is firmly at the heart of Price's plan. RSA already uses AWS for dev and test, its UX labs, and – latterly – web sites, which had been on the mainframe. RSA runs 50 sites – its own and partners', including John Lewis, M&S and Tesco. Cloud has proved vital in terms of providing flexibility with cost control.

“We will do a significant cloud service through our new infrastructure provider. Where that doesn’t fit we will go external, whether that’s SaaS, AWS or a private cloud solution.”

Core business won’t go on public cloud – RSA uses a BT private cloud today. What goes on cloud is being assessed through the lens of compliance and cyber risk.

Underpinning this is the need for RSA to become digital. The quote-to-buy and claims markets that RSA operates in have themselves become super-digitized – and the technologies are proliferating. Customers want to buy and change policies at home via an iPad or make claims via a dedicated app that might let them upload a photo in supporting that claim.

RSA is under pressure to be on the cutting edge, for its own sake and for that of its insurance retail partners, as well as for the sake of brokers who are under pressure from the perspective of their cost base. With that in mind, taking three months to instigate a single change on one aspect of a system leaves you dead in the water.

With this agenda in mind, and with the burden of outsourcing to unpick, successful RFP candidates will come under extremely close scrutiny.

Price outlined three possible outcomes for the RFP: to continue with incumbents but “renegotiated, restructured and recontracted”; find a new partner in each region; or sign one global partner. “I want the process to tell us the right answer,” Pierce said.

The winner – or winners – will need to demonstrate a flexibility and willingness to work with Price, not simply take on the running of servers and storage.

“I want to set us up for simplification and to leverage advancements in technology,” Price said.

Price wouldn’t tip his hand on possible winners but, talking to RSA’s CIO, it’s clear to see he’s impressed by the likes of Cognizant, Tata and Wipro – companies he claims guarantee their customers cost reductions through advancements in technology while helping them to simplify their business processes. Price reckons this is different to his time in the Baltics, GE Capital and Unilever, where he was CIO and had occupied roles directing IT and programs since 2001.

“The bigger players are struggling in the space and playing up catch-up to the agility of the tier-two players,” he said. “It’s genuinely transformational to doing it at Unilever and even doing it in the Baltics in 2008 –it’s a different world. What we have to do is make sure, through the RFP, we set our requirements in that new world, because I don’t want to simply swap providers – and cloud is at the heart of that.”

History man: Will RSA give Price's changes sufficient time?

Price reckons a culture change has already taken place inside RSA – with technology no longer about the plumbing, but about the business. That is evidenced by his ascent to the board and his raft of ongoing appointments. Signs are already good for the RSA business, having turned last year’s loss into a post-tax profit of £76m after it wrote down £92m in losses.

But it’s the IT infrastructure that’s being looked to help turn around the RSA’s business; as of now, however, with a potentially transformative RFP only just out in the market, the act of actually turning around that infrastructure is at an early stage.

I asked Price his priorities for the next year. They are: to execute on the IS strategy; build capability; and improve quality.

“It’s keeping the faith,” he told us.

The next few weeks will tell whether his peers on the exec and board are willing to keep the faith, or hand the keys to the Swiss. ®