Suncorp deploys Duck Creek at AAMI

Suncorp is “deep in delivery” of a new policy administration system in its AAMI brand in Australia, having first deployed the platform at a joint venture company in New Zealand.

Suncorp CIO Adam Bennett.

CEO and managing director Steve Johnston told the insurer’s full-year investor call that the initial deployment of the software, made by Duck Creek, in New Zealand “has reinforced our business case and the benefits we expect will be realised over time.”

The insurance group is making a “multi-year investment” in the policy administration system or PAS.

Implementation in most of Suncorp’s Australian brands will occur once the system is bedded down at AAMI, which a slide deck [pdf] suggested would be mid-to-late FY26.

Johnston said the company would provide more detail on the Duck Creek deployment at an investor day briefing in “late October”.

Outside of the PAS, Johnston said that “platform modernisation” efforts at Suncorp had seen it complete its migration of data into the cloud, along with “93 percent of all technology workloads” now also being public cloud hosted.

“[This has] enabled us to completely exit our legacy data centres over the course of the past year,” he said.

Johnston also touched on Suncorp’s investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which he said were core to the insurance group’s operational transformation.

“At the heart of our operational transformation has been the emergence of AI,” he said.

“It works hand-in-glove with our digitisation, automation, partnering and best in claims programs to deliver business improvements, but importantly through the lens of the customer. That’s because we know that if we improve and automate processes, and we use AI tools to do so, we’ll have the dual effect of improving customer outcomes and making our business more efficient. 

“At our last investor day, we described our adoption of AI through a mix of third-party AI utilities, AI capabilities that are embedded in our new core [PAS] system, and finally our own deep AI capability and the partnerships that we’ve built. 

“Almost 12 months on, the work program is really taking shape.

“We already have over 100 AI and machine learning models currently in production, with many new AI use cases planned to be progressively rolled out and finding their way into our business over the next 12 months.”

Chief information officer Adam Bennett later added that Suncorp is “starting to scale out those use cases across many different parts of the enterprise.”

“We start with the customer outcomes as the first and foremost agenda that we’re driving there, but we are seeing improvements in productivity and efficiency as we roll those out, and [we’re] just starting to see the momentum of that grow quite significantly as we look to the future.”

Suncorp recorded a full-year net profit of $1.8 billion, up 52 percent year-on-year.