Strengthens its digital leadership team in Asia.
Sun Life became the first company in Canada to launch an immersive cloud skills training program, which is now available to Sun Life employees.
Dubbed “Catalysts for Cloud” and using the AWS Skills Guild, a comprehensive skills enablement program to build cloud fluency, the initiative focuses on attracting and developing top talent. The program brings together Sun Life’s cloud experts alongside AWS instructors to offer peer-to-peer learning and hands-on training to build cloud skills across the organization.
Over the next few months, Sun Life will certify the first 450 business and technical employees with this AWS program and will continue to train more employees to help expedite cloud adoption and develop new client-facing and internal capabilities.
As part of its move to accelerate digital transformation and deliver new client experiences using the cloud, Sun Life built development workspaces in North America and innovation labs in Asia to bring together IT teams and business leaders to innovate with AWS technologies.
In Asia, for example, one of the labs created the Sun Life Secure Experience, which enables Sun Life advisors to collaborate with clients virtually using video conferencing and secure file sharing. The new offering uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Route 53 (AWS’s cloud Domain Name System web service) to provide a reliable and cost-effective way for clients and advisors to connect remotely to view and discuss financial documents.
The Sun Life Secure Experience also uses Amazon SageMaker, which is AWS’s service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly in the cloud and at the edge.
“Our aim in moving to the cloud is to be a digital innovator for our clients and use technology to shape how we work and develop employees at Sun Life. AWS’s portfolio of cloud technologies help us to be predictive, proactive, and personal by taking client insights and translating them into new, digital ways to meet their needs,” said Laura Money, CIO and executive VP at Sun Life. “I dream of the day when we get client insights in the morning and deliver a solution by the evening. I’m excited to know we can realize this dream with our teams working differently using AWS.”
“Sun Life has a long history of embracing digital technology to offer new services and features that keep customers at the centre of everything they do. By running on the world’s leading cloud, Sun Life has the ability to quickly build and scale new platforms to give customers more ways to manage their portfolios as the demand for digital services continues to grow,” said Frank Fallon, Vice President of Financial Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Sun Life’s cloud-first approach signals a commitment to modernizing its infrastructure that sets the standard for other insurers in Canada. Companies throughout the financial services industry can count on AWS’s scale, performance, and breadth of capabilities to drive innovation and continuously deliver for their customers.”
Sun Life strengthens digital leadership team with three new appointments
The financial services company also accelerated its digital transformation in Asia with three senior digital leadership appointments, furthering the company’s commitment to providing an industry-leading Client experience powered by digital, data and analytics.
Cassandra White joined Sun Life on July 12 as President of Digital Enterprise in Asia and will lead Sun Life’s digital transformation across the region. Cassandra is a seasoned business and IT executive with over 25 years’ experience delivering large-scale business transformation and technology programs in financial services organizations globally. She will sit on the Asia Leadership Team and report to Leo Grepin, Sun Life Asia President.
“I’m delighted to welcome Cassandra to Sun Life at such an important point in our transformation journey,” said Leo Grepin, Sun Life Asia President. “We’ve made significant progress in digitizing our business and her expertise and experience is a welcome addition as we accelerate our digital transformation and continue to deliver innovative ways of meeting and anticipating Client needs.”
In addition to Cassandra’s appointment, Sun Life has further bolstered its transformation and data capabilities by bringing in:
- Darren Pigg as Chief Transformation Officer, Asia responsible for digitalization, transformation, strategic planning and driving a culture of agility and innovation. Darren joins from KPMG and brings over 19 years’ experience as a consultant specialisingin insurance, customer experience and digital transformation in Asia and Europe.
- Aneesh Chaudhry as Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Asia responsible for artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, business intelligence and modelling initiatives. Aneesh joins from Hindustan Unilever and brings over 20 years’ experience leading data and analytics practices in the consumer goods sector.
“Sun Life is a dynamic organization and I’m thrilled to join at such an exciting time,” said Cassandra White, President of Digital Enterprise in Asia. “Darren and Aneesh’s addition to the team brings a wealth of experience and we are now ideally positioned to further drive our digital ambitions and continue Sun Life’s growth in Asia.”
