Derek Wilcocks has been an unobtrusive presence at the centre of South Africa’s IT scene for 25 years, first as a stalwart of the technology sector and now as Group CIO of Discovery. His career trajectory records not only his personal success, but also a profound shift in the role technology plays in business.
In the beginning, the action was all in the technology companies themselves. Wilcocks was in at the ground floor, having studied at Wits with the legendary group that founded Internet Solutions in 1993 (Ronnie Apteker, Philip Green, David Frankel and Tom McWalter). He joined IS in 1995, and held a variety of senior positions both at IS and Dimension Data, which acquired IS in 1997.
“The emphasis is not on integrated systems, but rather on integrated data.”
For example, as MD of Trusted Network Solutions, IS’ security arm, he helped install the first firewalls in South Africa and played a major role in enabling secure internet banking for both Nedbank and what is now FNB.
To their credit, both IS and Dimension Data realised early on that service providers’ primary job was to help clients take advantage of the opportunities created by the internet. For Wilcocks, it must have been like a boy let loose in a toy factory given his lifelong passion for the ‘economic side of business’ coupled with a deep interest in technology. These twin interests are mirrored in his degrees: a Bachelor of Economic Science (BEconSc), with majors in computer science and economics, and Honour’s in computer science and published research relating to recursive algorithms. His uncompleted Master’s focused on the use of statistical distribution functions in simulating networks.
The trigger for his move to Discovery was the Dimension Data executive team’s move to London. After much soul-searching, Wilcocks decided to stay in the country. “There are still excellent entrepreneurial opportunities in South Africa, my children are happy here – and there was this opportunity to join Discovery,” he says.
Personally, it seems like a perfect move given Wilcocks’ interest in the way business and technology interlock, but it surely also reflects the growing truth that much of the most interesting and challenging use of technology is now occurring in corporate IT rather than exclusively on vendor campuses and labs. Top technology talent is finding its way back into corporates, among it Wilcocks himself.
Disruptor supreme
Discovery is the very model of a modern, data-driven – and thus technologically astute – company. Founded by Adrian Gore in 1992, it turned the medical insurance industry on its head by aiming to help clients live healthier lives rather than simply insuring their risk. Its key insight was to identify the link between lifestyle choices and insured risk, and to harness the principles of behavioural science to incentivise its clients to make wiser choices. It thus reduced the risk for the insurers while improving clients’ quality of life.
The engine for this incentive-based system is Vitality. In Gore’s words, it’s now ‘evolved into a complete wellness system that tracks everything from physical activity to nutrition over the course of a person’s life’.
Vitality also manages the rewards that reinforce desired choices. Discovery is using the same game plan in its other businesses, such as insurance and banking. Good habits, reinforced by incentives, also promote better, safer driving and sound finances.
Such an approach can only succeed if it’s underpinned by the ability to collect, analyse and act on large (and growing) volumes of data. In other words, everything to do with data is critical, particularly the systems and applications needed to collect it, analyse it and then translate the resulting insights into new products and services, or support decision-making.
“Discovery is an innovative products company, and there is a natural fit between products and developers.”
The key here is the creation of multidisciplinary teams that bring together developers, subject-matter experts and, of course, the actuaries on whose calculations everything hinges.
Making the change
In such a company, it’s impossible to separate the business from the technology. For Wilcocks, this meant adopting a significantly different mindset. “In a tech company, one has dual allegiances: to your own bottom line and the client’s best interests. In a corporate like Discovery, there’s a total alignment between IT’s and the business’ goals. It’s a trust relationship,” he says. In this scenario, IT is part of the process to design new products and services from the beginning, and so has to be more proactive than the old-style corporate IT, which essentially just received instructions.
Wilcocks inherited a federated IT model; each of the group businesses has its own CIO. At the apex, the Group CIO is responsible for shared services, such as infrastructure, and for overall customer experience; there’s one datacentre for the group located at the Sandton headquarters. The CIOs of the subsidiaries are responsible for their specific systems.
The company has developed most of its core systems for the health and insurance businesses from scratch, while SAP Banking is used in Discovery Bank.
Potentially, it’s an organogram that can create the silos that continue to impede banks and other larger conglomerates from using their data effectively. Wilcocks says that Discovery has benefitted hugely from the decision taken by his predecessor, John Robertson, to base the IT architecture on a single-entity view. That means that every client and broker has a single identifier across all Discovery companies, so the elusive ‘single view of the customer’ is actually achieved.
“The emphasis is not on integrated systems, but, rather, on integrated data,” Wilcocks says. It’s a good example of how, at Discovery, the impact of IT decisions is felt operationally. In this instance, it meant Wilcocks was able to begin from ‘a good place’, as he puts it.
Vitality, which is the engine driving the group’s international growth and operates across five time zones, uses Amazon Web Services.
Skills are paramount
The integral role data technologies play at Discovery means that the ability to attract the right technology skills becomes critical. Discovery has more than 2 000 in-house developers, with the bulk of them working in Java to develop not only the core systems of the various businesses, but also the new products that are continually being developed in line with the insights generated by the data. Attracting the best data architects and developers is critical.
“Discovery is, above all, an innovative products company, and there is a natural fit between products and developers, as well as actuaries,” Wilcocks comments. “Our success relies on being able to attract and retain the best people.” He argues that Discovery’s good employer brand is a help, but providing cutting-edge technologies and the space to explore their potential is crucial, too. The cloud helps by enabling the easy creation of sandbox environments for experimentation.
Speed to market is also an important consideration and this, once again, means that in-house development teams make sense. The company schedules regular launch days for new products, which have to be available both in the relevant apps and the call centre.
As Group CIO, Wilcocks says that cyber security is an ongoing challenge. Here, too, a data-centric model is critical in order to safe guard the vital information while enabling its free flow. AI and machine learning will clearly play a growing role here, as they will in the rest of the business.
The challenges of success
Discovery’s long-established business model is based on investing in its established, emerging and startup businesses. One that falls into the emerging category is Discovery Insure, the personal insurance business. It’s now profitable and growing strongly. “We’re very excited about this business,” Wilcocks says.
IT has a key part to play in helping Discovery Insure achieve scale. On the sales front, the challenge is to make it much easier and quicker for brokers to obtain and customise quotes, while on the service front, there is increasing reliance on the customer service centre. It’s a fairly complex area, he says, because it services both clients and members of the Insure ecosystem, such as panelbeaters. “Technology is critical in streamlining and scaling these processes,” he says.
Over the course of the past year or so, Discovery has also launched five new business areas, all needing their own systems and people, and integration into Vitality.
One of them is Discovery Bank. As a startup, it offers the luxury of building the technology from the ground up; for example, its onboarding process takes just five minutes and can be done exclusively on a mobile device. But the bank is also under pressure to scale rapidly in a highly regulated industry, thanks not only to strong growth, but the transfer of the Discovery Card book onto its systems.
All of the five new businesses (the others are commercial insurance, the umbrella fund and Discovery Invest in the United Kingdom and Vitality 1 not only require their own systems and IT functions, but have to be integrated into the whole Vitality ecosystem, which, in turn, has been integrated into the Discovery Miles rewards programme.
Vitality 1 also represents a major technology challenge/opportunity, he says. It’s essentially a cloud-based, multi-tenant platform enabling Vitality to be franchised to international clients. It has already made huge headway and has successfully onboarded life insurance clients in Pakistan and South America. This is the kind of agility and speed that can be achieved when technology and the business work closely together from concept to execution.
The next frontier for Discovery is to create a superior, seamless customer experience that mirrors its innovative product environment. It’s a moving target as consumer expectations rise with each success, says Wilcocks, but it’s clearly an area in which technology, as always, has a key role to play.
ADVICE TO YOUNG TECHNOLOGISTS
- Become a T-shaped person. Specialist technology skills like coding aren’t enough in today’s multifunctional teams – one needs to be able to collaborate across disciplines, says Discovery’s Derek Wilcocks. His advice is to get a degree if at all possible or, at least to commit to lifelong learning.
- Think where your career will get most traction. “South Africa still offers great opportunities to make a difference, more so than developed economies,” he says. “But overseas experience is also very valuable.”
This article was originally published in the March 2020 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
Share