Old Mutual delivers customer-led omnichannel experiences with Contentstack

As a heritage brand in the South African landscape, Old Mutual has evolved to become a digital-led integrated financial services provider serving 14 diverse markets across South Africa and the sub-African regions. The company has an overarching purpose to leverage technical excellence in how they structure architecture and develop content, using a wide range of channels to provide an excellent user experience and offer financial wellness solutions for 12.5M customers. 

“With the shift that the organization has taken to become digitally-led, we knew the goal to put the customers’ financial wellness at heart would be driven by the tech pieces,” TK Maseko, Head of Software Engineering, Digital Platforms, said. “Old Mutual wanted to find a CMS that could help us serve the customer on their digital channel of choice with advice specific to them, and to be able to reward them as they take actions towards their financial goals, whether that is to protect what they have using insurance products, grow for prosperity using investment products, or sustain what they have — to be ready to handle life’s surprises. In that way, we had diverse and rich needs from a digital perspective.”

“We wanted to offer customers what they need in a personalized way,” Rafeea Saib, Information Technology Executive, Old Mutual, said. “Not just handing them a generic mobile app, but giving customers in South Africa the opportunity to use WhatsApp if they wanted, while recognizing that for customers in Zimbabwe or Ghana, USSD is the social app of choice. The needs of these markets are different, and our CMS had to be nimble enough to allow that.”

Prior to Contentstack, Old Mutual was using a CMS that limited its content management capabilities. Built in-house, there was no way to separate content for different countries, or have a different tech stack for each region, which was adding manual load, and limiting the amount of content that could be published. 

Today, Contentstack is used to manage Old Mutual’s content across 20 websites and 2 mobile apps, including experiences for different countries within Africa, and the Old Mutual iOS and Android mobile apps. All content is centrally managed in a single stack, and separated by locales so that it can be pulled into different regions or platforms to meet specific needs.

“We’ve seen a proliferation of people using Contentstack across the enterprise, for varied use cases from the WhatsApp team holding content in there, to documentation creation, flyers and advertising content, and even Legal using it for terms and conditions,” Saib said. “It’s so easy for people to use, and that’s encouraged adoption for sure.” 

The move to headless has allowed Old Mutual to be agile in the platforms and channels they serve, and improve the way content is managed across the business. “We’re not married to any technology, which really helps with flexibility,” Vincent Majavu, Technical Lead Web Platform, Old Mutual, said. “We’ve grown to a point where each country has their own dedicated development teams and are starting to empower them to build more complex journeys above and beyond information.”

With a single source of truth for all content, Old Mutual has dramatically reduced the time it takes to manage site assets and publish content, changing content once in a single place, and seeing this reflected everywhere. “Content teams love the tool over what we had before,” Majavu said. “Using Modular Blocks to write content once, and knowing it can then be used in multiple areas is so powerful for them. There are thousands of entries and pages, but within that, smaller modular entries can make up larger pages with no duplication, and all managed from one place.”

Next on the roadmap for Old Mutual is to continue to pursue digital excellence by adopting new features in Contentstack, and to improve their overall experience with the platform, optimizing content governance and moving to a full integration with Next JS. 

Key wins for Old Mutual with Contentstack include: 

• Increased publishing velocity: With streamlined content publishing, the business has launched many new sites across Africa, and increased the amount of content published.
• Streamlined content management: Editors love the ease with which they can manage content across 14 pan-African regions and 22 channels, reducing duplication and manual effort. 
• Personalized customer engagement: By leveraging future-proof headless technology, Old Mutual can now meet the customer on any channel or platform, providing products for personalized financial well-being.