ICMIF member Unipol Assicurazioni (Italy) has launched a powerful new platform named “NAMI”, built in concert with IBM and leveraging the watsonx enterprise AI suite, in order to transform its IT operations and accelerate its digital transformation journey.
Unipol Assicurazioni, one of Europe’s largest insurance groups and a leader in the Italian non-life sector, has renewed its collaboration with IBM after initiating a hybrid-cloud “by-design” strategy over the past year.
The next phase of the journey rolls out with IBM’s next-generation z17 mainframe technology and storage, integrated with hybrid multi-cloud platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift, enabling Unipol’s IT organisation to more effectively meet rising customer, operational and regulatory demands.
The newly-built NAMI platform (named for the Japanese word “wave”) is hosted on-premises within Unipol’s data centres – offering the security and governance of an on-premises deployment, with the scalability and agility of cloud design.
IBM watsonx was selected for its openness – native integration with Red Hat OpenShift and compatibility with tools such as Ansible – and access to a library of foundation models and specialised models, giving Unipol the flexibility to choose the right AI solution for specific use cases while optimising resources and cost.
The solution was initially trained on IBM Cloud, then migrated on-premises for data security and governance reasons. This hybrid approach allows Unipol to leverage cloud flexibility while retaining control of sensitive data.
The business impact has been significant. Unipol reports that incident-handling time has been cut by 90%, and that its technical teams are analysing data more quickly, enabling smoother operations and improved responsiveness.
Mario Bocca, CIO of Unipol Assicurazioni, commented: “This project is the outcome of close collaboration with IBM, marking a significant step toward our vision of a modern, scalable IT infrastructure that quickly and flexibly responds to business demands.” Nico Losito, Vice President of IBM Technology Italy, added: “Unipol’s strategic growth and modernisation journey has effectively leveraged the hybrid-cloud-by-design approach with AI-powered automation features … This is a crucial milestone for the Italian market.”
For Unipol, this initiative marks not only a transformation of IT operations but the foundation of an AI ecosystem that will reach beyond infrastructure into business-wide use cases, enabling future automation across claims, underwriting, policy servicing and more.
