Achmea case study: Insurance company digital transformation

Real-life example of how iron mountain helped achmea insurance company to elevate efficiency and customer experience with digital transformation.

“Initially our relationship with Iron Mountain was largely operational, but now its technical and strategic. They are helping us make the transition to digital and achieve our goal of becoming an environmentally sustainable company.”

Eric Van Der Heiden, Manager content and output services, Achmea

Challenge

Leading insurance provider Achmea wanted to accelerate its transition to digital records, to reflect changes in customer behaviours. Top priorities were to safeguard confidential data in compliance with legal and industry requirements, while reducing a vast physical archive and making information more accessible to customers and staff.

Solution

Record Information Management from Iron Mountain includes transporting, logging and storing Achmea physical archives in a secure offsite facility. Files can be scanned for downloading or ordered online via the Iron Mountain Connect™ portal for next-day delivery. Image on Demand offers pay-as-you-go scanning for often-used documents.

Results

A strategic partnership with Iron Mountain is supporting Achmea on its digital journey. The insurance company digital transformation resulted in reducing physical archives, cutting costs and increasing efficiency. With information more readily available, Achmea can serve customers more effectively: securely, compliantly and sustainably.

Outsourcing: the best option for physical archives

“To carry out our core activity, we need customer data to be available, secure and legally compliant. Iron Mountain expertise and resources are essential to achieving that.”

Eric Van Der Heiden, Manager content and output services, Achmea

Ensuring compliance while mitigating risk

Protecting precious assets

As the largest Dutch insurer, Achmea provides 10 million customers with health, life and non-life policies. Dedicated to helping people manage risks for more than 200 years, this rich heritage including past mergers and acquisitions created extensive record archives. With so many file boxes to be classified and stored, Achmea just doesn’t have the space or resources to handle the process in-house. That’s why the company decided thirty years ago to transfer static archive management to Iron Mountain and for fifteen years now also its dynamic archives.. It’s a Herculean task requiring stringent legal and regulatory compliance, especially information security. Document destruction brings other complexities. For example, legal documents must be retained for seven years after the last policy beneficiary’s demise, which is why the digital transformation of this insurance company was not an easy task.

A smooth operation

Paper files are collected from Achmea offices, logged and barcoded for tracking, then stored in a secure Iron Mountain facility. Achmea orders file retrieval on the Iron Mountain Connect portal, for next-day delivery. On arrival, the in-house team scans and makes digital files available to the requestor. The pensions department also uses the Image on Demand service, where Iron Mountain scans and makes requested documents available for download. Now, however, customer interactions are changing. Mobile apps, social media and the company’s website are slowly replacing telephone and paper-based communications. This generates different data from images to recorded messages, which all must be archived.