Suncorp is a financial services group offering insurance and banking products throughout Australia and New Zealand. It has ten trusted brands: Suncorp, AAMI, Bingle, APIA, Shannons, Terri Scheer, CIL, Vero, Essentials, and AA Insurance. The Suncorp Group employs over 13,000 people and has $96B in assets. It is a Top 50ASX listed company. The company purpose underpins everything the Group does: Building futures and protecting what matters.

Commitment to innovation, customer satisfaction, and internal efficiency led to implementing the in-house developed Suncorp Online Automated Requests (SOLAR) Application. This initiative positions Suncorp as a global leader in implementing an end-to-end digital experience to enable customer self-submissions of ‘not right’ in-scope transaction disputes.

SOLAR is a remarkable web application built to enable branches and contact centre staff to submit 100 requests and disputes on behalf of Bank customers. The app pairs an intuitive design with numerous APIs to integrate with multiple systems of record across the company, including all bank divisions and document repositories. This enabled pre-population and validation of customer details and banking data without manually trailing each system to source the required information.

This initiative is particularly special due to Suncorp’s strategy to decommission legacy technology at pace and the inherent complexity within legacy architecture. The SOLAR initiative progressed from an idea to a kick-off within just two weeks, with the application’s framework built rapidly.

The strategy for managing large-scale analysis, development, testing, and implementation at a rapid pace was designed in conjunction with business representatives to overcome the challenges of meeting fast-approaching decommission dates, a relatively small technology team for the scale of delivery, a need to minimise business interruption, and avoiding bottlenecking during the various phases, particularly testing.

The strategy included identifying suitable scope and teams to pilot the new application in its Minimum Viable Product state. Leveraging the learnings from a small-scale pilot, the strategy evolved to incorporate a progressive rollout of the application scope. The requirements, development, and testing were built in time feature-by-feature, with parallel delivery of multiple features at different phases. This strategy enabled the smoothing of peaks and troughs of design and sign-off points and testing and release cycles throughout the project lifecycle to stagger the workload and maintain pace with the immediate delivery milestones.

During its peak, the team demonstrated outstanding agile capability by rapidly designing, building, and deploying features in nearly every sprint for an entire quarter, ultimately delivering from a standing start within nine months. This is Suncorp’s largest single Automation project delivered to date (with 1,600 users, 176 features, 81 enhancements and 1.1m historical records migrated to SOLAR) with exceptional collaboration between technology and three business areas (Everyday Banking, Business Banking, and Home Lending) to implement a shared solution. With an average of 8,000 monthly submissions, internal Bank processes were transformed by removing the secondary system, implementing a workflow orchestrator, and applying automated controls to minimise risk and contribute to a one-stop solution for internal Bank processing.

The project transformed customers’ experience with in-scope transaction disputes by automating the front-end digital experience into back-end operations to create a truly end-to-end digital flow: a world-class implementation for the digitised experience. Disputes Optimisation (TDO) enabled automation and integration between SOLAR and Suncorp App (mobile banking) to enable customers to seamlessly self-serve the submission of ‘not right’ in-scope transaction disputes for review directly through the app interface. The integration with one of Suncorp’s largest internally built web apps instantly creates and efficiently routes the tasks to downstream teams, with an average of 400 customer digital submissions per month and 10,000 tasks completed per month (including assisted channels).

This technology’s primary focus is to provide customers with an unprecedented level of convenience in submitting disputes and, more importantly, to expedite the resolution process. Customers can now effortlessly navigate the dispute submission process, leading to faster outcomes and improved overall satisfaction.

Beyond the customer-facing benefits, this has significantly streamlined internal operations and facilitated a seamless flow of tasks, contributing to increased efficiency and reduced response times. Furthermore, the initiative has led to a noteworthy reduction in call volumes, underscoring its effectiveness in improving overall workflow and resource allocation.

For information about Suncorp, visit suncorp.com.au