Athora Belgium is one of the many national entities of the Athora Group, based in Trieste (Italy). The Athora Group is a major player in the global insurance industry, covering both life and non-life insurances.
Athora Belgium (previously called Generali) was created in 1901, more than 100 years ago. It grew a lot thanks to mergers and acquisitions of other insurance companies and became one of the major players of the Belgian insurance landscape.
As many insurances but also financial institutions, Athora Belgium is subject to various laws and regulations, coming from both Belgium and the European Union. The compliance to these laws is crucial for Athora if they want to keep doing what they do.
Cream started to work with Athora in 2016 to help them on compliance with the “LPC” but we played a major role the following year. The fight against money-laundering is not new and in May 2015, the European Parliament and Council published a 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, known as AML4. The institutions affected by the directive had to be compliant for June 2017.
AML4 covers 2 main aspects: the fight against money-laundering and against financing terrorism to “contributes to global security, integrity of the financial system and sustainable growth.” Cream put together a multi-disciplinary team to help Athora be compliant. Lawyers worked directly in the Compliance team to help them understand and communicate the directive to the business teams where Cream’s Business Analysts defined the impacts of the law on the company’s systems and processes. We analyzed the various gaps and proposed innovative solutions that had then to be implemented by the IT teams. Creamers delivered strong business requirements and then worked hand-in-hand with the developers to provide the best solution… until AML5 pops-up, probably around 2020.
Today, Cream keeps on helping them on compliance matters (LPC, AML, GDPR,…) and on product development to gain more brokers and therefore insure more people and increase its business and impact.