The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a seismic shift in the way people engage with financial service providers. As Discovery’s tech leader Derek Wilcocks highlights in this interview with BizNews founder Alec Hogg, even the tech laggards have had to upgrade their knowledge of the nuances of apps and internet systems to get things done while in isolation. People born before 1980 and classified as “older” have jumped into the digital world and are “wading” into web portals to figure out how to improve their finances. Along with this shift, criminal cyber activity has also mushroomed, with crooks targeting individuals whose home computer systems have vulnerabilities, says Zaid Parak, Chief Information Security Officer at Discovery. He warns that major breaches in the corporate world are coming. – Editor
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Well, it’s time to talk about all things IT and the Group Chief Information Officer at Discovery, Derek Wilcocks, is with us, as is Zaid Parak who’s the Chief Information Security Officer at Discovery. We couldn’t have a better duo to help us through the challenges that many are finding by working from home. Not when to have their sleep and their food, but actually what it means for the technology that they’re busy with. Derek, just by way of background, you’ve been in this field since 1994. Our paths have crossed a few times in the past when you were chief executive of IS and also of Dimension Data here in South Africa. Nice to see you in this new guise at Discovery. Yours is a presumably a global function now, given the way that the group is expanding.Â
Yes, I think one of the most exciting parts of Discovery is our Vitality Group initiative, through which we partner primarily with life insurers, although we’re now adding the health insurance component around the world and we provide them with actuarial know-how about how to reduce the risk in their books and therefore increase the valuation of their back books through applying our Vitality expertise in behaviour change. We’ve developed a platform called Vitality One that we offer them as a completely new age platform, which from a technologist perspective is obviously very exciting. It’s a platform that’s entirely hosted in the cloud. It’s deployed in several locations around the world and we’re able to stand up a client on that platform now within about 4 to 6 weeks. The sort of platform you would get in the Silicon Valley startup, very exciting.
Being based in South Africa, is it not a disadvantage?Â
It has its pros and cons. One of the advantages of being based in South Africa is that we have excellent technology people here. I think the best technology people in South Africa are attracted to the financial services sector. Discovery is certainly one of the top employers in that sector and that does make it easier to attract and retain talent. If you were competing with some of the big tech companies around the world in other markets, it might be harder to attract the kind of talent that we’ve got.
Moving on to the big subject of the moment, people working from home. Within the business and certain colleagues of yours that I’ve spoken with, Adrian Gore was saying 10,000 people worldwide out of the office into their homes. That must have made a big difference in the way that things work centrally.Â
There is quite a significant change in a very short period of time. Typically before Covid we had about 1,500 people working from home on a daily basis around the world and we move within a 2 week period to more than 8,000 regularly working from home and certainly, over 11,000 who have logged on from home on occasion. That was a major achievement for us.
What it demonstrated was that having that base of the 1,500 had taught us the lessons we needed to know and we were able to use the same technology, the same security protocols and get people home very, very successfully. I think probably the most remarkable area for me has been that we now have over 2,000 voice-based contact centre agents working from home. If you’d asked even the most optimistic technologists a few years ago, they would have said a voice-based contact centre agents could never work from home. Now we have that as a normal way of doing business.
Presumably, they have other contact points as well, when you say contact, is it call centres in effect?
Yes, we have sent call centre agents home and predominantly they are still servicing their clients through voice mechanism. Although they do also have check functions and e-mail servicing to augment that but are able to make perfectly clear voice calls from their home locations.
Derek, do you use any of the off-the-shelf software solutions like Slack or Google Hangouts or other things that generally would be used in a smaller business?Â
We primarily use Microsoft Teams and everything that goes with that for our internal collaboration. The reason for that is that it integrates with our security technology very effectively, which makes it easier for us to set up and management teams. Slack is quite widely used in our development teams, but it’s not used elsewhere in the business. Slack has fantastic features as far as integration is concerned, but it is quite hard for a non-technologist to get their mind around.
Let’s bring in Zaid Parak, because the next point of this discussion has to go to people working from home who haven’t done so in the past. Must be a nightmare at least initially when you’re trying to keep the data and the whole system secure?Â
Yes, I think with Discovery, we were actually quite lucky. Since we are both 2 to 3 years ago when we started moving into our wonderful new building. We already started with the adoption of remote work and working from home. So by and large, our technology and security capabilities were really set up to support remote working, just not at the scale. When lockdown’s started, we scramble to increase capacity and the bells and whistles going.
From a capability perspective, we were sorted. The people change was a lot harder and I think right now, what a time to be an attacker. With all the uncertainty of the situation going on everywhere, spam and fishing attacks, they’ve risen tremendously in tenfold, that’s primarily the highest attack factor that’s being used right now. On our side, it was more around the people factor and awareness and getting our staff to be more cognisant of what they doing and how the interacting with the systems more than actually enabling the technology.
Do you have a list of dos and don’ts?Â
Oh, yes and it keeps on growing. It started off with a 5 point dos and donts and now as the world is changing and more collaboration tools are coming on the market and people wanting to use more and more tools, that list is growing quite a bit.
When someone goes home and from the 11,000 people who’ve at least logged in at some point in time within the group, do they have to have certain technology or certain protections on the computer before they can do so?Â
All our endpoints are managed with our security capabilities. The majority of our staff are connecting with Discovery-owned and managed devices. For those that don’t, we’ve created VPN capabilities where if they do use their own devices, they are still protected. The data still protected once they connect to our network and activities are monitored and checked.
Do you use Cloudflare or something similar?Â
Yes, we are on Office 365, a lot of our Microsoft stack is in the cloud and our vitality platform, etc. are also sitting in the cloud.
Derek, from a more broad perspective, the movement of the business towards digital. One of the conversations I had with a colleague of yours, said that you had a launch where you had 7,000 people attending remotely. Now that, too, is something, I guess, beyond our wildest dreams. You’d have to hire a number of Sandton Convention centres to get that number of people into a room in the past, forget about the other transport logistics and so on. Has that brought new challenges?Â
It’s been a significant opportunity, and it has been much bigger than the employee change, although not probably not as widely visible. We have seen with members and brokers a significant change to digital. Interestingly enough, it’s primarily been with the Gen X or older people born before 1918. I saw last week the Cap Gemini 20/20 World Insurance Report and it’s very interesting to me that the millennials have increased their use of digital technology over the last 2 years from about 50% to just over 60% as their preferred mechanism for interacting with insurance. The Gen X’s have gone from 30% to over 60%. Now you’ve got Gen X and Millennial having the same propensity to use technology or digital as their first choice for interacting with insurance industry worldwide.
We seeing that in all member base, the number of people that use the app or our various Web portals is growing tremendously and particularly we are seeing our intermediaries are awakening to this technology. For them, the alternative was to stay at home and not be able to engage with their clients at all. It really has been a fantastic enabler for them to keep those client relationships and to keep their business growing during a very tough time when a lot of people are looking for that independent financial advice or concerned about their retirement, their insurance coverage, even their banking capabilities.
It really has been quite a boom for us and as you correctly said, the whole area of conferencing has grown tremendously. One interesting data point for you, in Discovery on average every day, just over 8,000 employees now working regularly from home use video conferencing technology between 1.5 and 2 hours each. Which I think is quite a remarkable statistic.
If you take into account that some probably are not using it, it’s not smoothly distributed. People are spending a lot of time on these kinds of technologies and becoming very comfortable with these technologies. I think that’s not going to stop once Covid ends. That behaviour is not entrenched, people have seen that in many instances it’s far more efficient for them to cut travel time.
I don’t think it will replace physical interaction altogether. There will be a time where we’ll all yearn for a bit of face to face, actually shaking somebodies hand and having a cup of coffee together but for many of the more administrative side of things for training, or learning? It’s a far more efficient way of running your business and running your life and is now very comfortable for people.
It’s still early days because our infections in South Africa are rising. So it’ll be some months before we can really decide on this but are you seeing a hybrid model developing in business into the future, where people will work more from home but then still have the option of going into the office?Â
Yes, certainly. Current, our best view is that with a few exceptions, we would still want people to come into the office to maintain that culture and that feeling of being part of a business that is so important in any organisation.
We certainly envisage a situation where people will have desks in the office, they won’t only come in for meetings, but that actually come in, for instance, for a day, a week or 2 days a week to ensure that they don’t just have a formal interaction in the office, but that also there for a day to just meet people informally running to people in the corridors, at the water cooler, etc.
We still think it’s very important to our culture going forward. Many companies will find the same thing. As you correctly pointed out, I had I formal global team, and in my experience 3 to 6 months of working from home, the novelty starts to wear off and people actually start to long to come into the office, and I think we haven’t seen that yet. Many people are very comfortable with us at the moment, but the novelty will wear off for the majority of people.
Zaid if the hybrid model does take off at whatever degree, you can be sure that the criminal enterprises are thinking the same way as well and the criminal enterprises can often pay better than legitimate ones. Are you seeing much increase in cybercrime or maybe even the expertise that’s being applied?Â
Yes, definitely. From January this year, globally, it’s skyrocketed and in the South African context, we’ve been seeing literally a double increase on attacks and different methods every single week. To a point where during the course of April/May its highest it’s ever been.
From a skills perspective, definitely the attackers are changing their tactics. They are taking full advantage of the potentially unsecured networks that home users often have and compromising the home network rather than going for corporate networks.
The infrastructure as well, the denial of service generally used to be against websites. That has shifted now to remote services, infrastructure like your VPN, etc.. The other gut feeling that we have is right now the attackers are sort of spraying and praying, just trying to get a foothold and within the next six months, we’re going to see major data breaches and compromises in the corporate world.
Derek, just to close off with a broad kind of thought on this. If things are going more towards the digital side and we’ve had this kick in the butt of, as you were saying, the Generation Xs who are now clicking onto this. How can you see the business developing, say, over the next 3 to 5 years?Â
There are many opportunities for us to continue. What Discovery always been brilliant at, is launching innovative products and particularly innovative, integrated and composite financial products, to make those far easier for people to understand and use, using digital media.
It Is just far easier, using particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning and data science capabilities, integrated with digital media to give people very rapid turnarounds of very complex topics. One of the things we launched just a few weeks ago to our intermediary community was something called AutoQuant, where we can turn around a quote very quickly, and that’s because we can scan in existing policies that that user might have using artificial intelligence.
In this case, we’re actually using Google’s imaging engine to do this. That kind of technology takes something that people would have been used to taking a couple of days, maybe a 48 hour turnaround time to get a quote, we can not give them a quote within minutes.
That sort of integration between the digital channels and then the data and artificial intelligence capability and in some instances in all short term insurance business, also bringing in the internet of things. That fourth industrial revolution, as people like to call it, will completely change the way in which we distribute insurance products and financial services products and the way in which both intermediary and the member organisations and the members themselves consume those products.
