With the digital transformation of many industries, this kind of question is bound to come up more and more often. And the answer is more and more frequently: in the cloud. If it is undeniable that for many operators of the economy the Cloud seems to be the solution to many problems, and often allows concrete gains in efficiency, these choices raise questions.

The problem is that most large industrial or service groups think in terms of economic and financial performance. Information systems are only seen as tools and often the legal risks linked to their choice and implementation are underestimated.

And this remark is all the truer since the French company is in fact a multinational. Indeed, around the data, its use and storage, there are a number of rules that have only become stricter over the years, including the Data Protection Act, which has recently been strengthened with the Regulation for Data Protection (RGPD), a European directive.

BUT LET’S GET TO THE POINT!

The topic that caught our attention was the announcement about La #MACIF migrating its largest line of business to the Guidewire InsuranceSuite cloud platform (www.guidewire.com/fr). It is an American actor with the hosting of its solutions and a priori of its data in the US…

This migration was accompanied by GTF a German service company (www.gft.com). In summary, Macif deployed the Guidewire InsuranceSuite solution for its largest line of business, Mobility, on Guidewire Cloud. According to stakeholders, this successful project, which was managed by global digital transformation leader GFT, sets new standards in the insurance industry and brings substantial cost savings and competitive advantages to Macif.

It is remarkable to see the communication on the Macif side, “This new solution should allow us to go faster on the market with new value propositions, and to propose more personalized solutions to our members thanks to the technical architecture of the Guidewire applications,” said Yann Arnaud, Director of Member Needs Responses and Innovation at Macif. “In addition, it should improve the quality of our underwriting, the monitoring of the life cycle of our policyholders’ contracts and the management of claims, thanks to the intuitive nature of Guidewire applications.

Guidewire; indeed, their ease of use exceeded our expectations.”

“We wanted to be able to focus more on our core business – taking care of our policyholders – and spend less time managing IT systems,” added Fabrice Leyglene, CIO of Macif. “This cloud solution also facilitates the white labeling of our products and services for resellers. So this migration is directly in line with our business strategy. And finally, we will be able to integrate the most advanced cloud

the most advanced cloud solutions on the market into the different elements of our value chain.”

Emmanuel Naudin, Regional Vice President, Sales – EMEA, Guidewire, added, “This is the largest implementation of Guidewire InsuranceSuite in the cloud in Europe to date. This demonstrates that Macif is at the forefront of technology innovation in the insurance industry. The solution has worked very well from day one, which is a testament to the excellent collaboration between Macif, our partner GFT and Guidewire.”

“This was an ambitious project. The scale of this cloud implementation is a major milestone for Guidewire in Europe. But we knew we could do it, Macif trusted us, and by using

Macif trusted us, and by using resources and experts from five countries in Europe and the Americas, we succeeded,” said Mathieu Liabaud, managing director of GFT France.

Thanks to this approach, Macif benefits from numerous advantages in terms of costs and business activity. More specifically, the benefits are as follows according to its promoters:

• White labeling of products or services for resellers becomes much easier.
• Applications are maintained and managed by Guidewire, freeing up Macif’s IT department to focus on more important business issues.
• No on-site hardware and labor to maintain application systems reduces IT expenses.
• The SaaS solution allows to be always up to date.
• The solution is easy to use, giving customer service employees more time to interact with members and build their relationships.
• New products or services are quicker and easier to launch than with the
• to launch than with Macif’s old system.

This is the classic communication about the benefits of the cloud, but it often obscures other elements such as the loss of internal expertise on infrastructure, making it difficult to challenge the claims of the provider. Regular updates of a SaaS solution are not without consequences in a controlled environment (pharmaceutical industry, banking, or insurance), so a team capable of evaluating the impact of new features and testing and potentially validating them before going into production is needed. These more frequent updates lead to a significant workload…

It should be noted that all of Macif’s property and casualty insurance business will be implemented during the next deployments. As we can see, MACIF is very satisfied with the advantages of using this platform in terms of savings and efficiency.

However, let’s remember that MACIF is a rather special player in the insurance field, because as a mutualist, the primary interest of this insurance company is normally that of its members/customers, right? So how is it that this migration, involving personal data that could be critical, can be hosted in the United States??

Has no one in the Macif or GFT project teams heard of #RGPD, nor of the invalidation of #PrivacyShield and therefore of the legal impossibility of transferring the personal data of its policyholders (without their consent)? Are they able to ensure that the platform on which they are hosted will not use their customers’ personal data in any way? I hope that the #CNIL will take up the subject and call this insurer to order, if the guarantees of private data management are not up to the required standard.

In addition, I invite all policyholders of #Macif to assert their right to data protection and to expressly request the prohibition of the transfer of their private data to the United States, via the dedicated form that I am referring to (online form) in order to facilitate the process.

I think that this is an important citizen element, we can no longer deny the importance of managing our personal data, so we should no longer hesitate to act, to request the people responsible for processing the data, who are obliged to accede to your requests within a month. Moreover, if you do not receive a reply or if you do not like the answer, do not hesitate to contact the CNIL. It is up to you to take back in hand the sovereignty over your data which is one of the key issues of a recovered #DigitalSovereignty!