Interview

Chad Hersh, Head of Worldwide Market Development, Life Insurance at AWS on enabling cloud-first and customer-centric transformation at FWD insurance

There are good reasons why AWS is one of the world’ s most successful and trusted cloud service providers. Global capabilities but local presence, a continuous culture of industry-leading innovation and collaborative development, and some of the most advanced digital solutions in the industry, to name a few.

These capabilities and more help clients in the insurance sector transform the way they operate, enabling them to modernise core systems more efficiently, harness the power of data, and deliver new and innovative experiences to customers.

“ As well as providing an incredibly wide array of technology capabilities, from cloud infrastructure and a full range of data and analytics solution to AI, ML and agentic capabilities, we also build industry-specific accelerators that help insurers get more value from their cloud and AI transformations,” says Chad Hersh, Head of Worldwide Market Development, Life Insurance at AWS.

“ A great example of this is Insurance Lake,” says Chad.“ It’ s an insurancespecific data lake accelerator that’ s easy to implement, low cost to run, open source with no license costs, and built from the ground up to support insurance data.”

Changing the way people view insurance

An example of how AWS enables cloud-first and customer-centric transformations is its partnership with innovative pan-Asian firm FWD Insurance. Unlike many in what is still a traditional industry, FWD is a digital-first and technology-driven company with a vision to change the way people feel about insurance.

“ Technology is crucial to this,” says FWD’ s Group Chief Technology and Operations Officer Sandeep Pandey.“ We have a very clear strategy and AWS has been a key partner for our platform and architecture across the experience layer, process layer, integration layer and infrastructure.”

Chad points to three fundamental pillars that distinguish AWS in the market when working with partners like FWD: a very comprehensive solution portfolio that goes far beyond cloud to power everything from customer service to risk, proven experience and a strong culture of innovation.

Supporting transformation at FWD

FWD began its cloud-first strategy in 2020. The company announced a five-year agreement with AWS in 2024, focused on