Financial Services

Accelerating service delivery as financial services go digital

Admiral is a UK-based insurance business that has developed enormously in its 30-year history. Starting as a car insurance specialist, the business has grown to include home and travel insurance, personal loans, and car finance. Today, the Admiral Group employs more than 11,000 staff and operates in eight countries.

The growth of Admiral has coincided with seismic changes to the financial services industry. For insurance, digital engagement has transformed how consumers explore, compare, buy, and submit claims. Today, it is far quicker for customers to generate an insurance quote across the industry or to switch suppliers.

Admiral 2.0 is the company's plan to accelerate the speed of service delivery. Being faster to market with relevant, personalized services will enable Admiral to create a point of difference in a crowded market. This presents a huge data challenge; Admiral currently serves 7.4 million UK customers and issues up to four million insurance quotes each day.

"There is business value in analyzing the data, but managing that data is incredibly complex," says Luke Erickson, head of IT service operations, Admiral Insurance. "Our business has gone from a couple of on-premises data centers to having data spread across multiple clouds throughout Europe. We need to be responsive, flexible, and cost effective in our cloud choices."

Business services have gone from requiring minimal network journeys to extensive visibility. It is critical Erickson's team understands these journeys and has valuable insights to detect and resolve issues before they impact the customer experience.

"We want to see network trends, but what's most important is visibility of any changes in network performance in real time," he explains. "I want to quickly rule in or rule out possible root causes. For network engineers, they want to prove it's not a network fault."

Erickson also sees this as a critical staging point in Admiral’s journey towards full-stack observability. “Our eventual goal is to aggregate data from all our domains and achieve an open and scalable source of insights that support our technology stack and the wider business,.” he says."

Luke Erickson, Head of IT Services and Operations at Admiral, spoke with us at Cisco Live EMEA 2024.

Delivering key performance insights across cloud platforms

As key components of Cisco Full-Stack Observability, AppDynamics and ThousandEyes provide powerful visibility across the complex reality of Admiral's modern applications and network infrastructure. Together they deliver key performance insights across multiple public cloud platforms and the crucial API interactions required for modern application experiences.

"Cisco AppDynamics and Thousandeyes are incredibly useful for us," says Erickson. "It takes us straight to the root cause of an issue."

Admiral first deployed Cisco AppDynamics in 2016, while the adoption of Cisco ThousandEyes was fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Admiral went from 70 users working from home in February 2020 to 7000 by March 2020. ThousandEyes—already being tested in an Admiral sandbox environment—was able to quickly establish visibility into 7,000 endpoints all looking to access the corporate network.

"We then spent a year mapping out different customer use cases and network journeys for all business services. That design was so thorough it then took only two weeks to deploy," Erickson explains. "ThousandEyes fits our needs perfectly."

The adoption of Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes, he adds, was engineer-led, but it has ignited the broader IT team. "We have a team of 35 looking at monitoring, change management and network operations. They're the first to respond in the event of an issue. Our engineers recognise Cisco ThousandEyes and AppDynamics are best-in-class, and now our CIO has also got onboard. He now has access to the dashboards and reporting. He understands the importance of improved visibility across application and network health."

Industry-leading resiliency with comprehensive visibility across multi-cloud infrastructure

Admiral has established what it believes is industry-leading resiliency across its multi-cloud infrastructure. In fact, confidence in its ability to quickly pinpoint and resolve issues led the IT team to establish a two-hour SLA on resolving any application or network downtime; the industry standard, meanwhile, is four hours.

"The financial services sector is pretty hot on addressing downtime," says Erickson, "and we're well within the two-hour SLA. We haven't come close to two hours in the last 12 months. That's the power of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes."

Greater uptime means greater productivity for 7,000 hybrid-workers and error-free performance across Admiral's digital channels. "The dream is a 24/7, high performance digital experience for all customers," Erickson adds. For the network operations team, the impact of Cisco ThousandEyes has been to pivot away from being seen as the “fixers” of network problems to providers of evidence of the business' digital progress.

Looking ahead, Erickson anticipates even tighter integration between the two solutions as the company moves further along in its observability journey. This will empower Erickson to take his mission of minimizing downtime, securing applications, and delivering exceptional user experiences to the next level.

"We don't have teams doubting us. ThousandEyes and AppDynamics are trusted. Our north star is full-stack observability, and that is the direction of travel of Cisco. If we can hitch our wagon to Cisco’s solutions, we'll end up where we want to be."