Verizon cloud ensures premium benefits for Ageas Investment Management

HONG KONG - The Hong Kong-based arm of one of Europe’s biggest insurance groups, Ageas, has chosen Verizon’s cloud as the foundation for its wealth management trading platform, i-Invest. Verizon will host and manage the IT infrastructure to support the platform within its secure, enterprise-grade cloud environment, based in Verizon’s state-of-the-art Hong Kong data center.

Headquartered in Belgium, Ageas has a heritage spanning 190 years with assets valued at over €103 billion (USD114.2 billion). In Hong Kong, the company ranks as one of the largest life insurance players in the market. i-Invest was developed by Ageas to enable the company to offer its customers, agents and partners diversified investment instruments, such as mutual funds and bonds. The portal gives users multiple language options, currencies and account set up structures, and was created by its own organizational unit, separate from the company’s traditional insurance business.

“Innovation, innovation and more innovation – our industry demands it and IT must be able to push boundaries to generate real business results and not just operational efficiencies,” said Henk ten Bos, Chief Information Officer for Ageas in Hong Kong. “It’s all about identifying new product solutions and empowering our intermediaries to serve their customer better – particularly important in a competitive financial services sector where we are constantly challenged by competitors, changing regulations and changing market environment.”

Verizon’s cloud experts in Hong Kong worked with the application providers to design, test and deliver the IT hosting infrastructure. Delivered on Verizon’s enterprise cloud platform, the agreement is further supported by extensive managed services and a service management team. In addition, Verizon also facilitated a thorough audit ensuring a fully compliant platform satisfying Ageas’s stringent security standards. 

“As one of the first financial services companies to use cloud technology to generate new business opportunities, Ageas has really taken a leadership role in showcasing how the worlds of IT and business are increasingly merging,” Verizon Asia-Pacific’s Group Vice President Francis Yip said. “These days, the CIO truly belongs in the boardroom with the rest of the C-suite.”

In March, Verizon announced a suite of expanded and enhanced cloud services in Hong Kong and Melbourne to meet the demand for secure, enterprise-grade cloud capabilities, offering customers improvements in memory, storage and network uptime, as well as enhanced flexibility and control.

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