Transforming Industry

40 41 FINANCIAL SERVICES Reaching the Gen Z customer Nationwide was founded in 1926 to provide automobile insurance to farmers. Today, the company has transformed to attract new-generation drivers with a digital-first mindset. Nationwide’s Innovation team wanted to rapidly launch a new brand and technology platform to help it access the Gen Z customer segment, which would otherwise have been hard to reach. “We wanted to prove to ourselves that we could move fast,” says Scott Liles, lead executive, Innovation leader at Nationwide and President of Spire, a Nationwide company. “We put a stake in the ground and said, ‘Within this calendar year, we’re going to get something new to market.’” EY Nexus for Insurance was chosen as the platform for the new product, which was delivered in just seven months and runs on Microsoft Azure. Taking a Design Thinking approach, EY constructed a consumer persona called Tonika, who is in the 25-37 Gen Z ‘adulting’ range and wants to engage via a mobile experience. The digital-first platform simplified the insurance-buying experience for customers like Tonika. With just a scan of the drivers’ license and the responses to four questions, an auto policy could be issued, within 60 seconds. EY helped Nationwide bring the disruptive product to market within seven months, in time for a December 2019 launch. This was despite the additional challenges inherent in setting the product up as a separate company. Read the full case study > RETAIL One platform fits all Founded in New Zealand in 1979, Michael Hill is one of the world’s largest high-end jewelers, with almost 300 retail locations across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. To manage global store operations and deliver better customer experiences at scale, Michael Hill worked with implementation partner DXC Technology and Microsoft to build a new retail operations platform on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce and other Dynamics 365 business applications. Matt Keays, Chief Information Officer at Michael Hill, explains: “We saw how we could use the out-of-the-box interoperability in Dynamics 365 to help us make the business more agile and innovative.” An internal initiative called Project Obsidian was launched to optimize in-store retail operations, customer service, warehousing, inventory, stock movement, and other retail processes by using Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to expand its retail operations Dynamics 365 helped to increase visibility across the supply chain and inventory availability, enabling each individual retail store to be managed as a warehouse location. The company is using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to support its warehouse management system (WMS), transform its supply chain, and connect production, inventory, and distribution directly to in- store operations and customer fulfillment. Nat Cooper, General Manager of Global Logistics at Michael Hill, comments: “Now we can deliver agile flow solutions that we could only dream of with our legacy systems.” Read the full case study >