Principal Financial unifies IT to lay foundation for growth

For companies whose business units have traditionally operated independently, centralizing IT operations under one strategy can reap significant benefits — especially when it comes to offering a holistic customer experience and establishing a unified data foundation for leveraging the latest emerging technologies.

That’s where EVP and CIO Kathy Kay found herself in coming to Principal Financial Group from PG&E in May 2020 with a desire to lead an aggressive plan to adopt digital technologies, ranging from the cloud to AI.

To that point, IT pros within the company’s three US business units, its international business unit, and its holding company had implemented cloud computing and other technologies ad hoc. As such, Kay’s biggest challenge in setting the stage for her digital ambitions — and one that has involved the entire C-suite — has been unifying the IT operations of Principal Financial’s individual businesses units in order to develop an enterprise-wide data foundation and cloud architecture on which to build its next-generation services.

The Fortune 500 company, born an insurer in Des Moines, Iowa, roughly a decade after the Civil War ended, is under pressure to provide customers with an integrated experience, particularly due to its expanded financial services portfolio, including the acquisition of Wells Fargo’s Institutional Retirement and Trust (IRT) business, Kay says.

“What caused us to move much faster to the cloud was aligning our technology assets with the capabilities we needed to enable a modern business strategy,” she says. “The customer had a 401(k) with us, for example, insurance benefits, and also asset management services, and [each] of those units did not know they shared a customer. Customers expect to be treated holistically.”

The multinational operates in 80 countries, has a market capitalization of $18 billion, and employs roughly 20,000. It has traditionally served SMBs and government-based retirement plans from its Iowa and Charlotte hubs, and it has sizable footprints in Chile, Brazil, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and India.