While Sun Life has been synonymous with traditional insurance, the Canadian-based organization has forged ahead to digitally transform into a fully diversified and modern financial services institution that includes US$1.4 trillion in asset management. In fact, 45% of Sun Life’s revenue comes from asset management with the rest divided across a comprehensive portfolio of health and insurance products for consumers and institutional clients. The modern financial services lineup includes virtual healthcare, personalized financial planning, digital payments, and as-a-service advice.

“Our CEO wants us to think and act like a digital company,” said Dariush Shoja, vice president and corporate CIO at Sun Life. “Using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we are digitizing the entire business to provide personalized and high-value services throughout the customer lifecycle.”

Shoja spoke during a session at the SAP and SAP Fioneer for Financial Services Forum Americasevent in Boston, Massachusetts, where he showcased the company’s digital transformation that modernized the company’s finance platform.

Digital Closes Gap Between Generative AI Promise and Reality

Shoja immediately struck a responsive chord from the audience in the room who chuckled when he jokingly asked if anyone’s nightly dreams during college revolved around a career in finance. Drawing from his company’s experience with digital transformation, he acknowledged the industry’s change management challenges.

“When we’re talking about finance in the context of digitization, it’s not just about automation or systems. It’s a paradigm and culture shift,” he said. “I’ve been an accountant and we are tough to change, partly because for many years we’ve followed generally accepted accounting principles. You need to start at the top with the CEO, CFO, and everyone on down to support the change. Organizations aiming to become digital and adopt state-of-the-art technologies like generative AI should focus on getting buy-in for the journey.”

Modern Financial Services Platforms Are Cloud-Based

Coming from earlier sessions in the day that touted the incredible promise of technology advancements like generative AI, Shoja was also candid about overcoming the reality that professionals in the financial services industry face.

“Although everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and digitization, historically there hasn’t been a significant amount of investment to update systems that are aging or nearing end of life,” said Shoja. “But one of the key enablers of growth is moving to the cloud. Digitization is creating the foundation for our future as we renovate and modernize our platforms.”

Connected Data Drives Informed Decisions

One of the objectives of Sun Life’s finance platform modernization was to connect previously disparate data between geographies and business units. With operations in regions worldwide, including North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, along with an expanding product portfolio, managing data was paramount to effective financial management that fuels customer satisfaction and company growth.

“We have to build, evaluate, and run complex actuarial policy models that meet evolving regulatory mandates worldwide and corporate profitability objectives,” said Shoja. “Going to the cloud has provided efficiencies from consistent operations across every geography. Moving from manual spreadsheets to automated dashboards provides finance with faster access to insightful analytics from larger and more complex data sets. People can easily drill down to find the information they need to make the right optimal decisions.”

Out-of-the-Box Digital Thinking

Like every organization that’s managing millions of transactions, data standardization and integration was extremely important to create Sun Life’s modern global platform.

“Even though our systems were only about 15 years old, eliminating technical debt was key to our transformation,” said Shoja. “We replaced traditional ways of thinking with out-of-the-box strategies, using modern native tools in the cloud platform to gain efficiencies. For example, when we want to pay a claim, the system automatically generates all relevant journal entries. We’ve strategically aligned technology with finance and the rest of the business.”

AI Can Save Valuable Time for Financial Services

Shoja saw numerous solid use cases for generative AI, traditional AI, and machine learning in the financial services industry. AI could quickly find data gaps to speed up time-sensitive quarterly accrual management reporting. Sun Life has created a team that’s focused on AI use cases in reconciliation and other areas. However, the company is also relying on partners to bring the full value of AI capabilities into the business.

“Large language models aren’t feasible for organizations to build on our own, AI should be built into digital solutions,” he said. “As SAP is doing, we need companies to provide AI solutions and make it part of their package. SAP is a strong partner in our finance modernization journey.”