CEO Insights Magazine

Buying insurance ensures security for a person's family as well as assets from uncertain financial pitfalls. However, the traditional offline insurance process can be frustrating with all the extensive paperwork, commotions, and complicated procedures that lead to delayed processes with high operational costs. However, over time, the insurance sector operation has moved into a digital ecosystem, which has tremendously benefited the sector with more flexibility and faster and simpler procedures. Other than being one of the leading insurance providers in Hong Kong, Blue Insurance is also the first digital life insurance company in the city. The firm's impressive digital journey has been led by her Chief Information Officer, Aaron Lee. A fintech & innovation expert, Aaron is helping the firm stay ahead of the curve by staying abreast of the latest disruptive technologies as well as opting for innovation in its journey of complete digitalization.

In an exclusive interview with CEO Insights ASIA, Aaron shares about his overall professional, his vision and strategy for Blue Insurance in terms of future roadmap, and much more.

Throw some light on your early education and professional background and experience. How are you leveraging your professional expertise to craft outcome-driven solutions for Blue Insurance at present?

His expertise especially in FinTech/digital transformation has been along with more than 25 years of experience in IT strategic planning, project management, strategic partnership, and alliance formation with Tier-I IT Solution providers. he worked as the CIO for the corporates - SHK and Co. Ltd., UA Finance, SHK Finance, and SHK Credit and he also worked in many senior regional management roles for many consulting firms such as PCCW Solutions, Atos, and RGP and provided enterprise advisory consulting and business services to a portfolio of sizable clients within the Asia Pacific region ranging from insurance firms, banks, financial institutes, multi-national corporations, Hong Kong-based conglomerates, and HKSAR Government.As the Chief Information Officer at Blue Insurance Hong Kong, he is responsible for formulating digital transformation services strategies and deploying Fintech/DX solutions, including but not limited to disruptive digital and online technologies such as AI, Big data, blockchain, cognitive, and machine learning to transform the company's capability in finance services innovations, strengthen the Company's market-leading, and drive business revenue.

How are you adapting to the latest tools or technologies to revolutionize your services to be at par with the current industry standards?

Our partnership with Tencent Cloud Services across Fintech and Innovation continues to set the world standard for innovation in Digital Insurance by transforming at the forefront of emerging technologies such as e-KYC, dedicated private cloud, and customer data platforms using technologies such as AI and machine learning, on big data.

Blue has successfully deployed a single vendor Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution powered by Tencent Cloud services with production-ready, scalable infrastructure, and enterprise-level Kubernetes technology, including on-demand basis cloud and managed services to enable Open microservices topology in blue insurance core platform that addresses complex workload and maintains operational efficiency. To address various InsurTech and business challenges, Blue has utilized a reliable, cloud enterprise-class platform to handle an extensive amount of data and enable simplifying the process of data security, management, and operation.

As we advance, Blue will continuously keep abreast of the most advanced disruptive technologies development and enhance its innovation capability to lead the digitization of customer experience in the insurance industry.

Shed some light on your Digital Transformation Strategy at Blue Insurance Hong Kong.

One of our major innovations has been the new `Quote and Buy' customer platform in the form of the new generation of Kubernetes Microservice cloud, which is a first-of-its-kind private exchange built on Tencent Kubernetes Engines that enables a truly digital quote-buy journey for the customers to apply, pay, manage, and claim the insurance policies. Another major step towards digitalization has been the Blue Cloud Platform, a continuous delivery platform that enables Blue Insurance to adopt the cloud at scale, regardless of the cloud service vendor while ensuring security, compliance, and quality by design. Since its launch, the Blue Cloud platform has increased cloud adoption by 100 percent.

Another major solution of Application Performance Management in place for blue has been the end-to-end monitoring tool for system availability, a contextual servicing function that enables the introduction of the most innovative fintech product and services to customers for a more intuitive, seamless insurance purchase experience. has helped monitor the secured and reliable IT environment for Blue. Such innovation has been made possible by an unwavering commitment to internal up-skilling and training. Today, blue insurance has almost all IT engineers responsible for developing in-house technologies while blue's FinTech lab keeps the technology workforce updated with cutting-edge skills, including microservice-ready architecture and cybersecurity security.

What are your vision and strategic plan for Blue Insurance Hong Kong to stay ahead of the curve in the coming years?

A purely digital online channel is the best option for the `Digital Savvy' new generation. As digitalization continues to disrupt the traditional insurance industry model in Hong Kong, we are building a digital insurance ecosystem that consists of four different digital systems to connect different affinity partnerships, business users, and bank payment/e-wallet service providers. One of our major innovations in the last 12 months has been the deployment of the new `Quote and Buy' customer journey. Through continuously collecting data throughout the insurance purchase process while leveraging advanced analytics, the solution maximizes emerging technologies to enhance accuracy while avoiding the risk of human error.

Aaron Lee, Chief Information Officer, Blue Insurance

Aaron is a seasoned professional with more than 25 years of experience in IT strategic planning, project management, strategic partnership, and alliance formation with Tier -I IT Solution providers, and is presently working as the Chief Information Officer at Blue Insurance. A FinTech and digitalization expert with a knack for innovation, Aaron graduated from Staffordshire University and Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.