Insignia Financial consolidates its tech systems

Insignia Financial is consolidating its technology systems following a series of mergers and acquisitions, while also setting itself up to become an AI-enabled organisation.

The Australian financial services company, formerly known as IOOF, completed the separation of MLC in 2021 from NAB, resulting in the company no longer being dependent on the major bank's systems and technology.

The transition saw 700,000 MLC MasterKey and Plum accounts, alongside other systems and over 100 terabytes of data, moved from NAB to Insignia Financial.

Damien O'Donnell, who stepped into the CTO role at Insignia Financial in January, told the iTnews Podcast that “data and technology” system consolidation is key to realising its ambitions. 

“We've acquired a lot of duplication of systems and tooling from mergers and acquisitions,” he said.

"We've got a great opportunity in front of us to consolidate down onto target state technology systems and tooling post all that M&A activity.”

One area of consolidation is around observability, where the company has decided to use Elastic as its full-stack observability solution.

Elastic already existed in part of the business, and has since been determined as the target endstate for the rest.

Observability is “critical” to ensuring good oversight of applications and customer activity, O’Donnell said.

The platform had shown its worth in a migration project last year “where the team experienced performance degradation” as a result of the move.

“The observability platform was critical for identifying the issues in the system at that point in time, and not only identifying them and the root cause and providing some quick good insights but also once it had been rectified or assumed to be rectified, it was also the tool that we were using to validate the outcome of that rectification and remediation,” O’Donnell said.

“We've used that as a benchmark and a baseline to keep a good eye on it since then.”

On the path to AI-enablement

O'Donnell said Insignia Financial also has an “exciting strategy” to become “an AI-enabled organisation in the future.”

The company has marked AI as an enabler of its goal to be Australia’s leading and most efficient wealth management company under its 2030 vision.

O'Donnell said its observability work “fits nicely” with its wider tech strategy to grow into an AI-enabled company.

“One of the key criteria for Insignia becoming an AI-enabled organisation is we have to have technology that is contemporary and embracing a lot of that newer thinking and newer capability that is now available.

“Having older technologies [that aren’t] being invested into is not going to be able to keep up with the pace of change with some of the AI capabilities that are now coming off the shelf,” he said.

The company has set itself up with a “strong data platform behind the scenes”, based on GCP BigQuery, and has backed this with “strong governance, both from a data perspective and an AI perspective”.

It also has some “pretty solid history in AI”, which has given it “good grounding and good knowledge” to achieve its organisation-wide adoption objectives.

“We're accelerating quickly into not just the adoption of existing commoditised AI - GitHub Copilot being an example of that for the engineering crew - but also augmenting business processes and unlocking some of the capability that AI can offer.”

The company has amassed a strong pipeline of ideas for AI use, which is being prioritised.

This was an “interesting balancing act” for the business, which needed to pursue innovation while keeping a “good eye on risk and governance”.  

“We haven't used AI for a lot of client-facing servicing at the moment. We think that's an area of risk that we're being relatively conservative about and we've used it for a lot of backend organisational enablement,” O’Donnell said.