Building trust in the Insurance and Financial Planning professions


Acora demonstrated agility and flexibility to our requirements and the specific intricacies of our environment.

Acora is delighted to announce our latest client engagement with the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII). The CII is well renowned across the insurance and personal finance profession internationally. It has around 125,000 members and offers an array of services from qualifications, training, assessments, events and content publishing dedicated to the insurance and personal finance professions.

The institute is driving a business-wide digital transformation programme to support its strategy to build public trust in a united profession. To focus on this, the institute’s leadership needed to outsource the management and running of its applications, including the e-commerce platform.

This portfolio has many complexities to consider. It has several hundred data entry points and application interfaces with third parties, from training and testing bodies, qualification verification parties, payment solution providers and its own membership databases. With the pandemic only accelerating their digital journey, the CII was looking for a provider who could support its existing technology stack and its digital platforms of the future.

Acora Consortium (Acora) successfully tendered and won the contract. Utilising services from Redbourn Business Systems, a best in class IBMi consultancy, Acora will provide via its services platform, continued support of the CII’s existing estate and also the transition to the CII’s future platform, which will be a combination of e-commerce software, Magento, with ERP Nav system, and Microsoft Dynamics.

IT Director, Richard Trebble, explains why the CII chose Acora. “There is a strong culture fit. Firstly, Acora demonstrated agility and flexibility to our requirements and the specific intricacies of our environment. We also felt they had the necessary economies of scale to grow with us and add value. In addition, the team explain technical concepts in a refreshingly easy-to-understand, outcome-based language.”

Karen Washburn, Senior Service Delivery Manager at CII, said: “We had a sense from Acora that they were real people who cared as much about the working relationship as the technology service. They weren’t pre-occupied with what they could get from us and bureaucracy, but on how they could help us achieve what we needed. They mitigated our risks for the legacy systems by working with existing partners to ensure continuity of service and no loss of intellectual capital.”

Richard concludes: “We don’t see this as supplier-customer relationship but as a long-term strategic partnership. We will be looking to Acora for input on strategic decisions as our digital transformation journey evolves.”

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