Juan Ignacio Casanueva, Chairman of the Board of Directors at INTERprotección, said that the pandemic made it clear that companies that say they invest in technology actually do. INTERprotección made a strong investment in digitization, assuming risks.
In its strategy, the Mexican firm focused on accelerating the process of acquiring automobile insurance and managed to increase its market share by going from selling 200 policies per month in 2020 to selling 25,000 policies per month in 2022.
“We went against the current, which said that the ideal was to cut expenses and cut personnel. We chose to invest a lot in digitization and adding talent”, Casanueva highlighted.
In his speech, Gabriel Morales Becker, Global Technology Director of Cinépolis, shared that, prior to the pandemic, the group already had a significant adoption of digital tools, especially focused on facilitating customer service by digitizing dynamics such as the acquisition of tickets. .
However, by stopping all its main activities for the last two years, the movie theater chain faced a major challenge that led it to break its paradigms. For example, she decided to accept the sale of takeaway food. “Before we thought that we should defend the face-to-face experience. Today you can order any of our food through any platform”.
Morales said that today there are many technological options, so companies must avoid losing focus on their digitization strategies. To do this, the ideal is to focus on the basics: people and processes.
Santiago Ontañón, Business Information & Transformation Officer at Coppel, pointed out that thinking about success is usually an obstacle to transformation in organizations, more so for a company like Coppel that has had more than eight decades of constant growth, during which time it has added all kinds of technologies.
“At this point, systems architecture becomes very relevant. Paying attention to this point has led Coppel to become a platform of platforms, integrating financial, insurance, e-commerce, and logistics services, among many others, which must be connected to provide the best service to 15 million active customers.”
Therefore, he agreed on the importance of investing “seriously” in digital transformation. For example, Coppel, due to its large size, decided to invest in an agile factory to meet its digital needs, undertaking the most ambitious digital transformation project in the region. “We are the largest private company in Mexico, with 114,000 employees, and of these, some 5,800 make up our technology team.”
“Digitalization is a contact sport in which you must be willing to invest. Companies that allocate 4 or 5% to technology must invest the same amount to allocate it exclusively to transformation. You need a lot of enthusiasm, optimism and hope”, he concluded.
