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Sun Life’s Chief Architect on culture and upskilling, and their role in DX

Sun Life’s Alice Thomas on how the company’s 50,000-strong team supports a global network of clients. with nimble, tech-forward solutions.

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Pushing a digital transformation (DX) journey forward is a lot of work in any business. For Sun Life, it’s quite literally a massive undertaking. 

Think: 50,000-employees-navigating-change-and-upskilling-level big.

Managing change in the insurance industry is a complicated affair, as many organizations have to split their technology budgets between maintaining existing business, while also innovating. In addition, tech talent is hard to recruit in a competitive market, and agile workplaces make career progression less obvious for those who want to see a path forward.

For Alice Thomas, the key to success in a sea of challenges is culture.

As Chief Architect and Digital Technology Officer at Sun Life, Thomas is at the helm of the key teams responsible for delivering digital experiences for the business. A major component of the job is pinpointing areas to be improved, and implementing new and innovative solutions. And she has to do it for a multi-sided business made up of different stakeholders —  advisors, clients, and employees.

“In order for us to really be a digital company, we had to change our culture,” says Thomas. Five years ago the business adopted an agile approach to transformation that empowered teams to experiment, fail fast to succeed sooner, and learn.

“I think that’s a big change in how we look at digital leadership and giving people that opportunity to try new, innovative approaches and telling them it’s okay to do something different that you haven’t done before,” she says. “That’s a big change in our culture.” 

Previously, teams at Sun Life would operate in a hierarchical manner where employees would

“send everything upstairs for decision-making,” Thomas says. Big, monolithic projects would require endless back and forth.

When Sun Life switched to an agile approach, it drove more efficiency, and in turn, more innovation.

Alice Thomas (photo via LinkedIn)

“Our journey is called the digital enterprise. It’s not just digital for Canada, or digital for Asia. It’s the digital enterprise and everybody in the company is on the same journey.”

Thomas says about 70% of digital projects are completed this way, and the result is everyone talks with the same nomenclature and language, and everyone has input or is aware of what’s going on.

“We talk about career growth for people in these journeys, because roles have changed. Remember, the manager doesn’t exist in agile. They may be a scrum master, they may be a product leader. We’ve had to train everyone.”

Thomas says another important factor in building best-in-class teams is training and upskilling existing people. Rather than making individuals apply for their job all over again when teams move to an agile approach, Sun Life trains its people to shift to new ways of working so everyone is on the same journey. When new people are hired, Thomas says everyone plays a role in training, creating new learning, and growth opportunities.

“Whether you are a technologist or someone in the business, now you’ve got a new role — a kind of product owner — which was not something we had before. We’re shifting to new ways of working and giving everybody an opportunity to learn and be part of it.”

Photo via #WOCinTech Chat

When agile leaders focus on building culture, innovation wins

The biggest benefit of the approach Sun Life has taken, Thomas says, is the old days of “those guys in digital” being the only ones who know what’s changing are long gone.

Adaptability is also baked into Sun Life’s approach.

For example, during the pandemic, Thomas and her team experimented with ways of making it easier for clients to book virtual appointments with healthcare providers.

The result: Ella, a digital coach.

Ella is a voice interface that provides product recommendations and actionable, data-driven insights through personalized and intelligent nudges. Ultimately, it makes the process of booking virtual healthcare provider appointments easier via web, mobile devices, and using voice requests. Ella even enables clients to access their health and benefits information using Amazon Alexa. 

Sun Life says it is one of the first companies in the insurance and finance industries to implement a voice interface. Today, Ella has connected with clients more than 40 million times between January and March 2022.

And while it’s early days, Thomas notes that prototyping VR experiences and even virtual recruiting could be next on the docket. This could be especially promising, since much of Sun Life’s new talent consists of recent grads hoping to obtain a fresh perspective on emerging technologies.

“We are looking at the Metaverse now,” she explains. “Giving students a VR experience on what it’s like to work here and be in our building. We are trying to figure out what makes sense and the things that will make it easy for a client or employee to play with it and be interested.”

Innovation leaders pick their battles

While experiments are important for innovation, Thomas also advocates for prioritization, saying that it doesn’t make sense to try innovating everything.

“I was looking at quantum computing during the pandemic. We sent a couple of our developers on some quantum computing courses,” she explains. “When they came back, we learned that it’s still early days. We started looking at cases where quantum could help us, but nothing was really viable, because the technology is still early.”

Of course, timing and cost benefit analysis is also important, and technologies could be revisited down the road, but as Thomas says, “you have to be smart about what you pick.” 

Another thing that innovators need to get used to is they sometimes need to pivot away from projects after they’ve started.

“This is a culture of innovation that allows people to take some calculated risks, dabble in some new stuff, and walk away when it doesn’t work. You have to know when to take your learnings and get out. That’s key.” 

Thomas recalls a project years ago that took a lot of time, and in the end the leadership team decided the solution wouldn’t work so the project had to be rethought entirely.

“It kind of created some new DNA [at Sun Life],” she says. “It really changed the conversation around experimentation, how long you experiment for, and also being smart enough to get out quickly.”

Today, Thomas says about 10% of what comes through her innovation lab has gone into production, with the other 90% driving ongoing learning.

Photo via #WOCinTech Chat

Moving toward a more diverse and inclusive business

Culture is a key ingredient in Sun Life’s digital transformation success, but so is its focus on diversity and inclusion, says Thomas.

“You can’t get these types of client-facing capabilities built unless you have a diverse team,” she says. “Your team has to mirror your client groups.”

Attracting women to the company has been a big focus, and today, Thomas says 40% of Sun Life’s IT workforce is now made up of women.

“We’ve been successful because we’ve been able to hire and retain a lot of great talent in our company,” she says, crediting events and industry collaboration as some of the biggest contributors to the company’s talent pipeline.

Case in point: the WeaveSphere innovation conference.

Sun Life is a sponsor and long-time supporter of the event as part of its efforts to engage with young innovators researching career paths.

“We do a lot to attract talent, but it’s one of the most difficult, especially now for any company,” she says.

WeaveSphere, which takes place in Toronto November 15-17, 2022, creates relationships between industry leaders, developers, and academics who collaborate to accelerate innovation.

Want to learn more about Sun Life and its approach to innovation? Meet Thomas and the Sun Life team at #WeaveSphere. Get your tickets today.


DX Journal is an official media partner for WeaveSphere. We will share updates leading up to the event, and we’ll be live on location from November 15-17,2022. Join us and get your tickets at weavesphere.co.

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How businesses can protect themselves from the rising threat of deepfakes

Dive into the world of deepfakes and explore the risks, strategies and insights to fortify your organization’s defences

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In Billy Joel’s latest video for the just-released song Turn the Lights Back On, it features him in several deepfakes, singing the tune as himself, but decades younger. The technology has advanced to the extent that it’s difficult to distinguish between that of a fake 30-year-old Joel, and the real 75-year-old today.

This is where tech is being used for good. But when it’s used with bad intent, it can spell disaster. In mid-February, a report showed a clerk at a Hong Kong multinational who was hoodwinked by a deepfake impersonating senior executives in a video, resulting in a $35 million theft.

Deepfake technology, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), is capable of creating highly realistic fake videos, images, or audio recordings. In just a few years, these digital manipulations have become so sophisticated that they can convincingly depict people saying or doing things that they never actually did. In little time, the tech will become readily available to the layperson, who’ll require few programming skills.

Legislators are taking note

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on those who impersonate others using deepfakes — the greatest concern being how it can be used to fool consumers. The Feb. 16 ban further noted that an increasing number of complaints have been filed from “impersonation-based fraud.”

A Financial Post article outlined that Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, says she feels “a sense of urgency” to act on artificial intelligence as the technology improves. “Malicious actors have found ways to synthetically mimic executive’s voices down to their exact tone and accent, duping employees into thinking their boss is asking them to transfer funds to a perpetrator’s account,” the report said. Ontario’s Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework, for which she consults, aims to set guides on the public sector use of AI.

In a recent Microsoft blog, the company stated their plan is to work with the tech industry and government to foster a safer digital ecosystem and tackle the challenges posed by AI abuse collectively. The company also said it’s already taking preventative steps, such as “ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system” as well as using watermarks and metadata.

That prevention will also include enhancing public understanding of the risks associated with deepfakes and how to distinguish between legitimate and manipulated content.

Cybercriminals are also using deepfakes to apply for remote jobs. The scam starts by posting fake job listings to collect information from the candidates, then uses deepfake video technology during remote interviews to steal data or unleash ransomware. More than 16,000 people reported that they were victims of this scam to the FBI in 2020. In the US, this kind of fraud has resulted in a loss of more than $3 billion USD. Where possible, they recommend job interviews should be in person to avoid these threats.

Catching fakes in the workplace

There are detector programs, but they’re not flawless. 

When engineers at the Canadian company Dessa first tested a deepfake detector that was built using Google’s synthetic videos, they found it failed more than 40% of the time. The Seattle Times noted that the problem in question was eventually fixed, and it comes down to the fact that “a detector is only as good as the data used to train it.” But, because the tech is advancing so rapidly, detection will require constant reinvention.

There are other detection services, often tracing blood flow in the face, or errant eye movements, but these might lose steam once the hackers figure out what sends up red flags.

“As deepfake technology becomes more widespread and accessible, it will become increasingly difficult to trust the authenticity of digital content,” noted Javed Khan, owner of Ontario-based marketing firm EMpression. He said a focus of the business is to monitor upcoming trends in tech and share the ideas in a simple way to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

To preempt deepfake problems in the workplace, he recommended regular training sessions for employees. A good starting point, he said, would be to test them on MIT’s eight ways the layperson can try to discern a deepfake on their own, ranging from unusual blinking, smooth skin, and lighting.

Businesses should proactively communicate through newsletters, social media posts, industry forums, and workshops, about the risks associated with deepfake manipulation, he told DX Journal, to “stay updated on emerging threats and best practices.”

To keep ahead of any possible attacks, he said companies should establish protocols for “responding swiftly” to potential deepfake attacks, including issuing public statements or corrective actions.

How can a deepfake attack impact business?

The potential to malign a company’s reputation with a single deepfake should not be underestimated.

“Deepfakes could be racist. It could be sexist. It doesn’t matter — by the time it gets known that it’s fake, the damage could be already done. And this is the problem,” said Alan Smithson, co-founder of Mississauga-based MetaVRse and investor at Your Director AI.

“Building a brand is hard, and then it can be destroyed in a second,” Smithson told DX Journal. “The technology is getting so good, so cheap, so fast, that the power of this is in everybody’s hands now.”

One of the possible solutions is for businesses to have a code word when communicating over video as a way to determine who’s real and who’s not. But Smithson cautioned that the word shouldn’t be shared around cell phones or computers because “we don’t know what devices are listening to us.”

He said governments and companies will need to employ blockchain or watermarks to identify fraudulent messages. “Otherwise, this is gonna get crazy,” he added, noting that Sora — the new AI text to video program — is “mind-blowingly good” and in another two years could be “indistinguishable from anything we create as humans.”

“Maybe the governments will step in and punish them harshly enough that it will just be so unreasonable to use these technologies for bad,” he continued. And yet, he lamented that many foreign actors in enemy countries would not be deterred by one country’s law. It’s one downside he said will always be a sticking point.

It would appear that for now, two defence mechanisms are the saving grace to the growing threat posed by deepfakes: legal and regulatory responses, and continuous vigilance and adaptation to mitigate risks. The question remains, however, whether safety will keep up with the speed of innovation.

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Small banks emerge as the top source for small business financing

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Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed's Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing options.
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When it comes to borrowing money, small businesses are most likely to apply at large banks. But they often find success with their counterparts in the finance world: small banks.

Small banks—or those with less than $10 billion in total assets—comprise most of the banks in the U.S., much like small businesses account for nearly all U.S. businesses. More than 80% of small businesses that applied for financing at small banks were at least partially approved in 2022, according to data from the Fed’s most recent survey of small business employers. However, only 30% of small businesses applied at small banks when they sought financing.

About 2 in 5 small business employers applied for some traditional financing in 2022. Most needed the money to meet operating expenses, while a little over half sought cash to expand their operations.

Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed’s Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing sources, taking a closer look at their differences. Approval rates are based on applications for loans, credit, and cash advances at the various institution types. The Fed report was released in March 2023 based on a 2022 survey of nearly 8,000 small businesses with employees.


A bar chart shows the share of small business applicants at least partially approved for loan requests, separated by the type of source applied to.

Findbusinesses4sale

Small banks surpass online lenders, finance companies in approval rates for small business applicants

Also known as community banks, small banks are well-equipped to lend to small businesses because of their intimate knowledge of local economies. Small businesses are often young, with short histories, small operations, little collateral, and unproven financial success. These factors can make it difficult for founders to qualify for credit and loans—they’re simply a riskier investment for a funder to take on.

Small banks’ decision-makers live within the same areas where they grant loans, and they have insight into how certain businesses could fare within their neighborhoods. That makes it easier for them to analyze the risk of lending to small businesses and, in turn, decide whether to approve their applications. At least 3 in 5 (61%) applicants considered to be a medium or high credit risk were approved for financing at small banks; at large banks, not even half (45%) of these riskier applicants were approved.

By operating across smaller locales, community bank operators also have the opportunity to forge stronger relationships with business founders. The Fed survey shows that about 2 in 3 small businesses that applied for financing with these banks did so because of an existing relationship. Many of these relationships were forged in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, when community banks came through for small businesses with relief funds, including more intensive support in understanding and completing complex applications.

Small firms applying to other sources, such as online lenders and finance companies, are most often motivated by making quick decisions and perceiving that they have a higher chance of being approved. That was the case five years ago, but approval rates for both sources lagged behind small banks in 2022. Indeed, approval rates at both have fallen significantly since 2019, while approvals at small banks have grown.

Both online lenders and finance companies still approve slightly higher shares of applicants with medium to high credit risks compared to small banks, but only by a few percentage points. At the same time, many more borrowers reported dissatisfaction and challenges working with these lenders, including high interest rates and unfavorable repayment terms.

On the other hand, the vast majority of borrowers from small banks were happy with their experience—much more than those who borrowed from any other type of lender.

Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Ania Antecka.

This story originally appeared on Findbusinesses4sale and was produced and
distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.

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The new reality of how VR can change how we work

It’s not just for gaming — from saving lives to training remote staff, here’s how virtual reality is changing the game for businesses

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Until a few weeks ago, you might have thought that “virtual reality” and its cousin “augmented reality” were fads that had come and gone. At the peak of the last frenzy around the technology, the company formerly known as Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, as a sign of how determined founder Mark Zuckerberg was to create a VR “metaverse,” complete with cartoon avatars (who for some reason had no legs — they’ve got legs now, but there are some restrictions on how they work).

Meta has since spent more than $36 billion on metaverse research and development, but so far has relatively little to show for it. Meta has sold about 20 million of its Quest VR headsets so far, but according to some reports, not many people are spending a lot of time in the metaverse. And a lack of legs for your avatar probably isn’t the main reason. No doubt many were wondering: What are we supposed to be doing in here?

The evolution of virtual reality

Things changed fairly dramatically in June, however, when Apple demoed its Vision Pro headset, and then in early February when they were finally available for sale. At $3,499 US, the device is definitely not for the average consumer, but using it has changed the way some think about virtual reality, or the “metaverse,” or whatever we choose to call it.

Some of the enhancements that Apple has come up with for the VR headset experience have convinced Vision Pro true believers that we are either at or close to the same kind of inflection point that we saw after the release of the original iPhone in 2007.Others, however, aren’t so sure we are there yet.

The metaverse sounds like a place where you bump into giant dinosaur avatars or play virtual tennis, but ‘spatial computing’ puts the focus on using a VR headset to enhance what users already do on their computers. Some users generate multiple virtual screens that hang in the air in front of them, allowing them to walk around their homes or offices and always have their virtual desktop in front of them.

VR fans are excited about the prospect of watching a movie on what looks like a 100-foot-wide TV screen hanging in the air in front of them, or playing a video game. But what about work-related uses of a headset like the Vision Pro? 

Innovating health care with VR technology

One of the most obvious applications is in medicine, where doctors are already using remote viewing software to perform checkups or even operations. At Cambridge University, game designers and cancer researchers have teamed up to make it easier to see cancer cells and distinguish between different kinds.

Heads-up displays and other similar kinds of technology are already in use in aerospace engineering and other fields, because they allow workers to see a wiring diagram or schematic while working to repair it. VR headsets could make such tasks even easier, by making those diagrams or schematics even larger, and superimposing them on the real thing. The same kind of process could work for digital scans of a patient during an operation.

Using virtual reality, patients and doctors could also do remote consultations more easily, allowing patients to describe visually what is happening with them, and giving health professionals the ability to offer tips and direct recommendations in a visual way. 

This would not only help with providing care to people who live in remote areas, but could also help when there is a language barrier between doctor and patient. 

Impacting industry worldwide

One technology consulting firm writes that using a Vision Pro or other VR headset to streamline assembly and quality control in maintenance tasks. Overlaying diagrams, 3D models, and other digital information onto an object in real time could enable “more efficient and error-free assembly processes,” by providing visual cues, step-by-step guidance, and real-time feedback. 

In addition to these kinds of uses, virtual reality could also be used for remote onboarding for new staff in a variety of different roles, by allowing them to move around and practice training tasks in a virtual environment.

Some technology watchers believe that the retail industry could be transformed by virtual reality as well. Millions of consumers have become used to buying online, but some categories such as clothing and furniture have lagged, in part because it is difficult to tell what a piece of clothing might look like once you are wearing it, or what that chair will look like in your home. But VR promises the kind of immersive experience where that becomes possible.

While many consumers may see this technology only as an avenue for gaming and entertainment, it’s already being leveraged by businesses in manufacturing, health care and workforce development. Even in 2020, 91 per cent of businesses surveyed by TechRepublic either used or planned to adopt VR or AR technology — and as these technological advances continue, adoption is likely to keep ramping up.

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