Life insurer FWD Group Holdings is extending its partnership with Microsoft with a four-year agreement to provide access to the latest generative artificial intelligence (AI) innovations, while continuing to support FWD’s cloud-first technology strategy.
Based in Hong Kong, FWD plans to drive its generative AI initiatives by leveraging Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service and other enterprise-grade innovations.
Also, FWD expects to benefit from the private networking, monitoring and security capabilities of Microsoft Azure as well as its advanced AI models.
“Digital innovation has always been core to FWD’s vision of changing the way people feel about insurance,” said Ryan Kim, group CDO of FWD.
“This collaboration marries FWD’s pioneering spirit in Asia in some of the fastest-growing insurance markets in the world, with the global scale and skill that Microsoft brings in engineering and AI,” said Kim.
FWD is working to enhance the customer experience and its operations in areas like acquisition, marketing, channel and agent performance, underwriting, claims and customer service.
The company is also an early adopter of Copilot for Microsoft 365, an AI companion that supports employees in their day-to-day work.
Bill Borden, corporate VP of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, said AI is driving transformation across the financial services industry, opening new opportunities for innovation and business growth with agility and at scale.
“With Microsoft’s enterprise-grade AI advancements, we are helping the financial services ecosystem accelerate innovation to drive operational efficiency and greater value creation to customers,” said Borden.
FWD embarked on its AI journey in 2019 and now has almost 200 active AI models applied across its business, with over 600 use cases.
