The Primerica business regularly starts at the kitchen tables of Middle American families. Those personal conversations about finances and life insurance build trust that allows us to help families get the financial services they needed to protect themselves and future generations. Over the course of four decades, we have worked to enhance our client relationships while helping them achieve their financial goals, regardless of how they define them.

Updating knowledge, skills and technologies

In recent years, long-time Primerica employees were beginning to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, including knowledge about maintaining our heritage IBM WebSphere technology. So, we wanted to update our technology and refresh our employees’ skills while ensuring a successful knowledge transfer. Of course, growth often requires change, which can be difficult.

We reached out to the IBM Garage and said, “How do we get off of IBM technologies and onto IBM technologies? Oh, and while you’re at it, can you teach us how to properly manage and maintain this new technology?”

Migrating to the hybrid cloud

We worked with the IBM Garage team in Austin and migrated several existing applications to a hybrid cloud environment. Given the sensitivity and privacy requirements of financial services industry data, we decided to keep our customer data on premises and containerize many customer-centric applications on the public cloud.

This application modernization was the digital transformation we needed, but we also discovered something completely unexpected — a cultural shift. During our time working with the IBM Garage, we developed even more agile practices and adopted a user-first approach to business. By implementing these techniques across our company, we have found that we can further deepen our personal connection with customers, which helps us better provide the financial services and income protection they need. The IBM Garage helped us marry two critical, yet somewhat opposing, aspects of our business: good old-fashioned kitchen table conversations and modern, secure technology.

Watch the video below to see how the IBM Garage modernized technology for Primerica, and learn more about this project by reading the case study. Ready to get started? Schedule a no-charge visit with the IBM Garage.