Building the Digital Future of Insurance and Pensions at NN Hungary
Over the past year, NN Hungary has accelerated its digital transformation agenda, delivering landmark platforms that are reshaping how customers, advisors, and employees engage with insurance and pension services. Under the leadership of Grégory Saussez, Head of Digital Solutions and Marketing, the organisation has launched new digital sales capabilities, reimagined customer journeys, and advanced data driven personalisation to build a modern foundation for long term growth in a highly regulated market.
In this interview, we explore NN Hungary’s digital transformation roadmap, examining how innovation is delivered responsibly, how data and AI are enhancing customer experience, and how cultural and architectural change are enabling greater speed and relevance. We also look ahead to the emerging technologies set to redefine the future of insurance and pensions, and how NN is preparing to balance advanced automation with the human connection at the heart of trust.
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Digital Transformation Roadmap: Can you outline NN Hungary’s digital transformation roadmap and the key milestones you’ve achieved over the past 12 months?
The past 12 months have been particularly exciting, marked by the launch of two flagship initiatives from our global digital strategy: the Digital Sales Platform for our tied agent network and the Online Sales Platform for our customers. Internally, we refer to the Digital Sales Platform as the crown jewel of our vision, robust foundation for future innovation. The Online Sales Platform opens high-potential business opportunities and signals a strategic shift in how we engage with customers. All of these important milestones are fully aligned with our ambition: to grow our relevance toward younger generations and to improve financial self-care in the country.
Innovation vs Regulation: How do you balance driving innovation while remaining compliant in a highly regulated sector such as insurance and financial services?
This a true challenge but a necessary one, particularly in a highly governed sector like insurance. While regulations can constrain rapid or unconventional ideas, they also safeguard customer interests, which remain our top priority. At NN, we work closely with our legal and compliance teams to ensure that every innovative solution we deliver is providing the best quality of service to our customer while securing their data at 100% and staying compliant with our regulatory framework. This requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which we’ve cultivated successfully.
Data, Analytics and AI: How is NN Hungary leveraging data analytics and AI to personalise customer experiences across its insurance and pension products?
Data and AI are central pillars of our digital transformation strategy. At NN, we’ve embraced these technologies to enhance customer, agent, and employee experience. Our goal is clear: to accelerate our capabilities, personalise interactions, and deliver exceptional service. This is underpinned by robust data management practices, which we continuously refine. While we’re already seeing tangible results, we view this as the beginning of a long-term journey, with even greater impact ahead.
But to be able to benefit from this enormous capacity, companies need a defined structure. For example, at NN we have built a dedicated data&AI strategy, with concrete budget and goals, and even launched new squads to support all our departments to finetune or even reshape our processes to create even more value.
Culture and Change Management: Digital transformation often requires cultural shifts. How have you fostered a mindset of innovation and agility within NN’s workforce?
Cultural transformation is essential, especially in life insurance, where human-to-human interactions remain central. Recognising the urgency, we embedded change management into our digital strategy from the outset. Through targeted internal communications, training programmes, and close collaboration with HR, we’ve fostered a culture of innovation and a “test and learn” mindset. Our adoption of SAFe Agile has accelerated development velocity and instilled an MVP-driven approach, improving our time-to-market significantly.
Modernising the Technology Stack: How is NN adapting its legacy infrastructure to embrace cloud technologies, APIs, and a more modular architecture?
Since “day one”, we made a deliberate decision to move away from legacy models and embrace modern, cloud-based development and modern IT architecture. This transition was challenging, particularly due to limited internal experience, but ultimately rewarding. Once we began delivering features in production, it validated our commitment to the new tech stack. Integration with older systems posed additional hurdles, which we addressed by building mediation layers that now ensure reliable and stable orchestration across platforms.
Customer-Centric Digital Channels: How is NN transforming its digital channels to deliver more intuitive and accessible services for policyholders and pension clients?
Our digital strategy is anchored in a clear vision: to empower customers to choose how they interact with NN, while ensuring a consistent experience across all channels. We’re redeveloping all front-end applications, including the Digital Sales and Online Sales platforms, and plan to launch a new customer portal by 2027. Additionally, we’re implementing Salesforce as our CRM to further personalise engagement. We continuously gather feedback through surveys, focus groups, and market analysis to stay aligned with evolving customer expectations.
Impactful Digital Products: Can you share examples of recent digital products or services that have significantly improved client engagement or satisfaction?
Two recent examples illustrate our progress. First, the Digital Sales Platform has transformed the onboarding process, cutting it in half through innovations like SMS-based policy signatures, developed with our partner Contum. This enables advisors to focus more on customer needs. Second, we launched our Online Sales Platform for Health Insurance, marking a historic shift from advisor-led sales only to direct digital engagement too. This not only expands our reach to younger demographics but also positions NN in the growing health insurance market.
Future Technology Trends: Looking ahead, which emerging technologies or trends do you believe will have the greatest impact on the future of insurance and pensions?
Looking ahead, AI stands out as a transformative force, potentially as impactful as the advent of the internet. At NN, we see AI not just as a technology, but as a catalyst for reimagining processes, enhancing customer interactions, and automating tasks like claims management. We’re exploring AI assistants for employees, advisors, and customers to simplify complex products such as life and pension insurance. Imagine completing AML identification through an AI avatar, this is the future we’re building. Yet, we remain committed to preserving the human touch, which will continue to be a cornerstone of trust and empathy in our relationships especially with our customers.
In Association with:
Contum is a Budapest-based specialist in enterprise content management (ECM), delivering, integrating and supporting complex document and information management solutions for large organisations. Founded in 2004, Contum combines deep technical expertise with platform-independent implementation, consultancy and support to help businesses digitise, organise and secure their information flows efficiently and reliably.
