Hiscox moves to Oracle Cloud for financial systems, Workday for HR

Insurance firm replatforms to commoditised SaaS solutions as there's 'no competitive advantage to running a finance system slightly better than our competitors' says Group CIO Ian Penny

Insurance firm Hiscox is moving its legacy finance systems to a cloud-based solution from Oracle. The aim is to provide a system which can match the growth ambitions of the firm, according to Group CIO Ian Penny.

"We have a heritage set of financial systems including Cognos Planning [from IBM], but there's no integrated package," Penny told Computing. "When Hiscox was smaller and less diversified, that was appropriate. Now, looking at the growth ambitions of the firm, we need to transform our technology in finance, so we're moving to a cloud-based Oracle solution."

Penny recently joined Computing in its studios to discuss skills, automation and DevOps.

He explained that the cloud-based, off the shelf approach is appropriate for back office functions like finance.

"There's no competitive advantage to running a finance system slightly better than our competitors, so we're using a commoditised approach. In order to support our growth for next five to ten years where we expect our customer base to rise substantially, we need a robust back office," he added.

Hiscox looked at various solutions from organisations including SAP and Microsoft when assessing which finance system to use. Penny explained that the choice was made based on how well he thought each firm could deliver on its promises.

Although Microsoft was not chosen in this instance, Hiscox has recently started using its cloud platform Azure.

"The decision was made based on our confidence in the ability of those organisations to execute. Some of those partners have great execution track records in smaller companies, or very large multi-nationals. The type of finance system you need in firm with 200,000 employees is different from what you need in a smaller outfit. We chose Oracle for its fit with us and our firm."

Penny added that his firm also chose an HR solution from Workday for the same reasons.

"We also went from an in-house HR solution to using Workday. If you're settling an area that's already been pioneered by a commercial package, there's no sense in re-inventing the wheel. There's no competitive advantage to running HR differently from others, so we've implemented the standard package, but it is flexible and we can embed the Hiscox process into it."

He said that the aim with commercial SaaS solutions should be to keep them simple, and not customise them to any great degree.

"There's a great tendency to want to customise solutions, but that builds up a lot of technical debt. Sometimes you end up creating systems that you cannot unmake. But the beauty of some SaaS solutions is that you cannot customise them in the same way as you would an on-premises solution, so you get an evergreen platform.

"That means you don't get into that ‘stop the world we need to upgrade' place, and it gives you more currency. It also gives our colleagues modern tools so they can get on and do their jobs, and that's ultimately what we're here for."