Global financial services leader Manulife scales customer-centricity without compromising data integrity and security

Manulife Financial Corporation is an international financial services group operating in Canada, Asia, and Europe—and in the United States as John Hancock. More than 35,000 Manulife employees, 98,000 agents, and thousands of distribution partners serve almost 30 million customers and manage more than $1 trillion in AUM.

Manulife has always put customers first and consistently used technology to do it—from being the first insurance company in Canada to embrace mainframe computer technology in the 1950s to the development of highest ranked mobile banking apps in Canada.

After gradually scaling up its Salesforce implementation over several years, Manulife took on an ambitious plan to expand platform adoption as the company embraced a global effort to better manage the customer lifecycle and deliver seamless, thoughtful digital service to every customer.

“Manulife has a history of providing fantastic brick-and-mortar, in-person interactions for customers. Providing frictionless self-service for digital products is challenging in financial services, so we’re innovating, using technology with a focus on experience to eliminate friction for our customers.”

As Manulife added critical business processes into Salesforce, enterprise architects realized they needed to do more to protect their data. A highly regulated company operating in multiple countries, Manulife needed to ensure business continuity, data security, and regulatory compliance— to provide the highest level of Customer service around the clock.

Building the confidence to manage data globally and act locally

Manulife’s Technology team took their challenges to the market, looking for a Salesforce data management solution capable of handling the demands and complexity of a global-scale financial services business. Odaseva was the only platform that passed the test.

For Manulife, data success is:

Managing large data volumes and a complex data model

Manulife uses every Salesforce cloud, supports numerous call centers and sales organizations, and needs to manage hundreds of GBs of data across thousands of objects spanning multiple Salesforce orgs. It was essential to choose a solution capable of handling their complete data model.

Ability to govern data globally while honoring local regulations

Manulife operates numerous business units in countries across the globe. It was essential to have flexible architecture to satisfy localized business needs and regulatory requirements.

Establishing a powerful safeguard against data loss

Manulife needed a platform capable of backing up its most critical Salesforce objects every hour on top of automated full backups of key orgs.

Creating a clear window into data integrity

The ability to easily compare data and metadata in backups with production environments, get immediate alerts when a backup job fails, monitor changes to data, and track Salesforce Governor Limits.

Rock-solid data security

Rigorous security measures to address every potential vulnerability, including two-factor authentication, IP restriction, multi-layered data encryption, BYOK, ISO 27001 certified and and SOC2 compliant.

Working in concert with the broader IT security strategy

Given the sensitivity of Manulife’s customer data, it was essential to align a data protection solution with Salesforce Shield Platform Encryption and the organization’s broader data residency strategies.

Outstanding performance and scalability

With Odaseva, Manulife is capable of reaching backup speeds up to 300 million records per hour, with data stored on infrastructure that supports the largest Salesforce customers in the world.

Accelerating digital transformation. Protecting customer trust.

With Odaseva, Manulife eliminated a difficult digital transformation challenge, providing top-tier disaster recovery resiliency while empowering their Salesforce engineering and operations teams to move faster and deliver new innovations with confidence.

By putting stronger safeguards around customer data, Manulife is reinforcing the deep, trusting customer relationships at the heart of its business, while at the same time ensuring frontline staff have consistent, seamless access to the information they need to excel in their jobs.

“Odaseva has differentiated itself as not simply being a tool for basic backup and restore but a platform for helping manage Salesforce data,” says Jonathan. “Odaseva proved to us that it can solve the problems that come with large, complex data sets, who deal with granularity, high frequency and high volume.”