 Time because I really saw this entertaining presentation and now a German guys German guy from a boring insurance company tries to explain you what we are doing and with such entertaining presentations always tough to follow What I like to do and first of all I have to apologize a bit because I think you listen to Andreas Nolte this morning So I might repeat some of the elements that he was saying so sorry again for that I want to take you a little bit on a journey I want to take you on a journey that we as a very traditional company made To really think about our transformation and what you see we'll see with the slides And what it will tell you is is really German. I mean we do everything very structured So when we go into such a transformation, we look around ourselves. What is happening really reflect on our service We were standing and then we do kind of a program So and what you're going to see is exactly this journey So when we looked outside the world, we saw actually this It's actually if you look at it The transformation is happening and if we compare ourselves with the financial peers It's actually a little bit of difference to the banks and the insurance companies While the banks you already have seen a large degree of disruption This is not yet there with insurance companies. I Think one of the key drivers is probably that banks have naturally more interaction With their customers and therefore it was probably easier for startups to disrupt and go into the value chain So that was the outside world. So there's disruption out there Other financial peers are more affected than we are but the storm is rising So that was the outside look But then we looked at ourselves internally. I Would kind of bet that if I talked to some of my colleagues from similar companies like ours This might sound familiar with you So you're used to a waterfall approach Thinking in boxes and then you have a hierarchy to it While if we see where we should go is actually be far more agile Really be faster. I mean agile for us is actually two things being faster But also more customer centric and develop code that really matter for the customer So again, you know, we understood the way we try to understand what is actually Happening in the outside world again. So You know, we have the tech companies out there. We have also an insurance field some of the startup disrupting it And our core question was what do we learn from that and actually I will now show you the summary of What we learn and I want to highlight a couple of aspects. I mean, first of all, that was just our takeaway They are probably academics out there people much smarter than us who can give you another, you know, kind of Categorization, but that was our key takeaway and it works Quite well for us So first of all what you have to think about this whole transformation is it's actually not about it There are a lot of things that are actually business developments that are triggered by some it innovation, but it's not about it You know, if you look at some of the companies like Apple how they are really passionate about customer experience This is not per se it just, you know, it coincides if you look at lean principles that were out there already before if you think about You know slicing bigger investments into, you know Shorter amount of times. This was coming from venture capitalists already for quite a while Uh-huh and co-location is actually something you can do all the time Then of course you have very specific technological developments You have agile programming and you have elastic infrastructure that you can build on Actually, I don't know again, you know, you know, you know colleagues from other incumbents is always funny to talk about agile And I will later say a work word also on it When I now talk within the company, I become a huge buzzword and actually very often I run into, you know You run into a situation that is a little bit a caotic and somebody said me tells me Oh, don't worry. We're doing an agile way and then we always have to explain them You know look agile is actually a very structured approach. It's not about, you know chaotic behavior but you know, this was the reflection that we had and Then we were actually quite happy to say there are elements which we can build on Especially the lean startup approach that was Made popular by Eric Reese and where we are also in partnering up with pivotal to see how we can introduce it in our company So how does it look like? What we are currently doing is we have these six Leavers that are important to us and we have put that in a something called the true factory So the digital factory actually has a certain element of steering because like each and every If you if you compare yourself with a VC, you need kind of a final management What kind of projects do you do, you know, what is the strategic value behind it? How do you achieve this value? And then we have the so-called training center or garages where the people are actually working co-located in agile manner We have next to that also a company called Kaiser x-labs, which is focusing on UX design Was an internal company which became part of Alliance Germany just recently and Then we obviously collaborate with the global digital factory because we also have a digital factory on a global level We are a global company or we are part we as Alliance Germany a part of the global company And there are a lot of things where we can share developments across countries So that is how it looks like What I think was already alluded to we also thinking about minimum viable products because it's all about quickly learning on what is working and what is not working and we actually want to Introduce our discipline to say what do we actually want to Achieve so like the MVP proposal. So what is it? What, you know, what is the question we address, you know What do we want to achieve? What is the customer problem we want to solve? then People get our teams get money to work for roughly a hundred days and then we look again You know, whatever we realized was a successful or not and then our we have created something called a review Board which then looks as you know, can we go live with this do we have to improve or do we have to pivot? So now how does it really look like and there's one colleague later? He can you know, I don't know with a beer share you Some real-life experience that looks like And now it is to work. We actually introduced co-locations open spaces We have them in Stuttgart This is one of our major locations roughly 90 I think they were opened end of June and we have them in Munich where people really Work Co-located on the ground Focused on the concrete delivery There are no telephones at the working case so that they can really focus on development Which these kind of settings we put a little bit aside of Of our regular headquarters To really give the team a little bit the environment to work on the concrete Problems because what we see is that you know with all these different hierarchies functions if you're very functionally differentiated Teams get up often disturbed and don't have the chance to really work on the end product and very often these you know Departments they don't do it out of bad intentions. It's just how we used to work as I said one of the key elements is Agile development Which we do together with? Pivotal This is actually a slide That we use also internally To explain it and again the very first point I think I mentioned it earlier as always to say look this is a you know a proven approach It's not about managing chaos because sometimes people just say oh, let's be agile and then you know It's actually just another word for chaos I think if you look at this we started on this journey, but we still have to get better This is the principle and we now have to still stick with it part of it. We also now investing into What is called elastic infrastructure? We labeled it that way because of course in this kind of environments, especially if you have things in the In the customer-facing layer you want to actually implement bring time to market in a very rapid manner This is how it looks like you know on a simplified way on our side We still have of course our core insurance and back-end players You have to imagine what is insurance is about huh? This is long-time business I mean somebody buying a life insurance policy at the age of let's say 28 You know might turn it into a new tee and then you know This person has it until step so it's 70 years 70 years you have this kind of policy and those are in our systems So this is why we still need quite a very stable system who keep the basic data on on on this area But then we are investing in a customer-facing part Where you exactly have this interaction layer for customers, but also to introduce Very quickly new developments and to manage that we introduce in an integration layer that actually creates a connection between these two speeds There was not a quick part now listening to to my pre-speaker I was quite impressed especially with the with the reference to the matrix So I thought gee I cannot end on this slide because you know, it's high level. It's probably kind of boring for you So what I would like to do is to share with you some philosophical thinking why we think we're on the right way and When I was in charge in my previous job very often in transformation projects And then usually it transformation was one element out of it among many others and always the turns it transformation part was the one with the hassle and I said back You know, why is this the case? I really wanted to understand it Why is this the case? And then I started to reflect and as I also did some studies in philosophy I sometimes it's it worth opening books that are 2,000 years old and that's actually It's played to and that Aristotle Lee gave me some, you know help to understand it and Sometimes it's quite, you know easy if you think about it or some are quite simple if you think about code Code is actually very easy. It's logic logical. It's always logical You know, it's always an if then combination or whatever and it's always explicit It's always explicit. There's no hidden message if you want so, you know, you write something that's even but if you look into human systems human organization, they're neither logical Nor explicit they're implicit whenever I go to, you know, where the clerks sit. It's always interesting to see The kind of posters that put on their street Because this is how the real process is run But if you think about an waterfall approach and you ask people to do write down these requirements They would usually never have the idea to write down these kind of requirements that they for example need a screen where they can Put their postage on or something like that. So there's a lot of implicit knowledge out there And this is why agile really helps you All this helps you to really very quickly. It's actually more human. You really very quickly make the things transparent What are you working on and you you acknowledge that things are not always logical and are not always Explicit and this and this is why I want to end with was actually the discussion with Plato and Aristotle's Well Plato had the idea to say there's an ideal world, you know, but you know, we just have to get it right We just have to understand, you know These ideal world and write it down actually Aristotle said that is probably not the case If you think about it in the in the in the world, there are things that are always as they are But some some things especially in the human world are actually most of the time so but some some Different so coming back and this, you know, I wanted to write with you It was maybe a little bit of a philosophical and their pinning why I think this approach is really helpful because it acknowledges That the things that we do and if we look at the transformation that are ahead of us are neither fully logical nor are they always Explicit so you have to put a lot of thinking To take the people along with you on the journey so that they understand what it is about that they feel part of it and We hope and this is coming back to what I've presented to you With our digital factory, we we've actually built an environment where we can really push this transformation From a business development side So maybe that's the logical part and a technological side. Thank you you