Voya’s Digital Transformation: We Planned on a Trip to Venice and Ended Up in Amsterdam

Voya embarked on our digital transformation journey in early 2018. There was a growing imperative for us to modernize our digital applications. Voya grew from a set of mergers and acquisitions. In addition, we had for a long time underinvested in core digital capabilities. For these reasons, Voya suffered from twenty-year-old technologies that were out of date and needed upgrades. We also have many applications that perform similar functions that we are currently in the process of rationalizing. By focusing on our four areas of improvement (workforce, process agility, technology modernization, and digital experiences) we vastly improved the way we develop and run software systems at Voya. However, we did so with a few compromises along the way. Although we may not have experienced a gondola ride in the canals of Venice or the art of the Renaissance, the Venice of the North’s canals in Amsterdam, while different, are just as beautiful and Van Gogh is pretty good, too. Mike Stevens, AVP, Lead Digital Architect at Voya Financial Ruchi Gupta, Solutions Architect at Voya Financial