Achmea, the largest insurance company in the Netherlands, had to tackle some of the challenges facing many other large financial services providers around the world – integration of legacy systems resulting from a series of acquisitions, complex organizational structures with autonomous business units, a huge customer base to service and new global regulatory requirements.
Background and challenges
Dutch insurance giant Achmea was established through the merger between Interpolis and the previous Achmea, which was formed through mergers between Zilveren Kruis, Avero and Centraal Beheer. The new entity had 22,000 employees serving 4.7 million customers, generating a turnover of 14 billion Euros. Organisationally, the company had six business divisions, with group-wide shared central services, such as IT, group finance and compliance, but with the series of mergers, had inherited a variety of specialist financial services and general business management systems. According to IBM Global Business Services, Achmea was finding it difficult to produce accurate accounting information, due to the complex and laborious process involved in extracting data from these multiple systems, hampering group-wide reporting on profitability and inefficiencies.
Click here to read the full article in the May 2010 edition of Inside SAP.
