Grupo Financiero Banorte (Banco Mercantil del Norte) is a Mexican financial institution that integrates one of the four largest banks in Mexico in terms of assets and loans. Banorte Seguros (BS) offers its services in life, medical, car and property & casualty insurance through both banking and traditional channels.
“When Salvador Alonso, CEO of BS, told us about the need to define a Strategic Digital Transformation Plan (PETD), we understood his clear intention to personally drive this transformation from the top of the company,” says Cristina Moreno, Project Manager at Opinno. “Bearing in mind that the success of any digital transformation plan depends largely on the human factor and the involvement of the entire team, the start could not have been better.”
At Opinno, we understand digital transformation as a fundamental change in the way companies create value by implementing technologies and processes, new ways of working and transforming their culture and leadership.
Before starting the BS Digital Transformation journey, it was important to know the external context of the insurance sector, as well as the state of digital maturity and the needs of the company.
The pandemic has prompted the start of this transformation in the insurance sector, gaining agility, focusing increasingly on new customer needs, and highlighting the value of its distribution channels to deliver a seamless service, a personalized customer experience, and the highest possible value. Digital Transformation is already, in a nutshell, a key path for insurers to follow.
To determine the state of digital maturity of Banorte Seguros, we implemented a self-diagnosis process carried out by the management team in different areas. The result placed the company at the Be Digital level, an intermediate stage in this type of transformation, determined by the shared opinion in the organization.
At Opinno we have our own Digital Transformation model in which different categories are evaluated, starting with the digital vision, which will be the inspiration for the whole plan, defining what we really want to achieve. BS's vision is very specific in this aspect: to become a leading company in the sector that offers its policyholders an excellent, personalized and seamless digital experience.
Once the vision has been established, it is necessary to define the strategic priorities that will enable us to best accomplish the vision. Our model involves providing strategic clarity and focus throughout the process. For this reason, we understand that strategic priorities should be expressed clearly and concisely, such as “improving customer experience” or “adopting new business models,” and should not go beyond 3 to 5 priorities.
One of the keys to a good PETD, which is not always considered, is to know how to combine the strategy with the subsequent execution of the plan, so that it can be smooth even without the presence of our company. For this reason, we assign an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) to each strategic priority, which must be quantifiable and measurable.
The key focus areas are the ones that need to be worked on for a successful Digital Transformation. We are talking about the strategic direction, which must be clear, adaptable and shared by the entire organization; the soft enablers for promoting human talent, digital competencies or innovation and customer focus; and finally, the hard enablers which integrate everything related to technology and processes such as data governance and others.
Based on action areas, we define the list of projects needed to achieve the strategic priorities. Here again, conciseness and clarity are key. The roadmap groups the projects in a timeline including the expected results, so that they can be evaluated in terms of their impact on the organization's Digital Transformation.
In order to guide this transformation in detail, we elaborate the corresponding project sheets for each project, establishing clear metrics that allow us to know the real impact of the Digital Transformation on the business.
Finally, at Opinno we believe that our PETD must be actionable for our clients, so we have indicated the needs of a follow-up in each project so that Seguros Banorte has a clear plan for the next steps of a roadmap that can extend between 3 and 5 years. A period in which the added value and potential impact of a well-designed PETD will be key to the success of the company's Digital Transformation.
