For large, diversified financial services organisations, transforming human capital functions is no longer only about digitising HR processes. Increasingly, it is about creating an integrated, data-driven foundation that enables better workforce planning, stronger employee experiences, and more agile business operations.
For Sanlam, a leading pan-African financial services group focused on emerging markets headquartered in South Africa, with a strong presence in 31 countries, this transformation journey has accelerated over the past 18 months as the organisation expanded its focus beyond HR modernisation toward a broader cloud, data and AI-enabled human capital strategy.
Ravika Bandyopadhyay, Group Human Capital: Chief Operating Officer at Sanlam, says the organisation’s approach balances immediate operational requirements with longer-term transformation objectives. “We have adopted an ambidextrous strategy for our digital and data transformation journey, simultaneously exploiting operational excellence, proficiency and efficiency in our current landscape while exploring incremental innovation that enhances and elevates the user experience and driving our longer-term transformation journey – focused on leveraging intelligent, transformative technology to unlock business value.”
A central focus throughout the implementation has been ensuring that transformation delivers tangible business value while also enabling the teams responsible for sustaining change. Sanlam is supported by a dedicated support structure for the programme that includes a technical centre of excellence team, programme management, change management, and business analysis capabilities.
“Transformation required us to approach change from multiple perspectives simultaneously. We always look at transformation through the lens of people, process and technology. One of the realities organisations face is that many people are not ready to embrace the pace of technological change, which makes change adoption and leadership sponsorship critically important.”
According to Bandyopadhyay, Sanlam’s broader transformation strategy spans several interconnected focus areas. “A key priority being rebuilding our job architecture for relevance to the current and future workforce and more importantly to transition to a skills-based organisation. This will then unlock the opportunity for us to leverage SAP’s AI-enabled Talent Intelligence Hub which is the golden thread that links all talent practices to a skills currency.”
The organisation has also prioritised the implementation of a cloud data solution, master data management and platform scalability as part of its effort to establish a more unified data core across the business. With multiple business entities operating across the group, standardising and scaling trusted workforce and operational data remains a significant strategic focus area.
Desigan Govindsamy, Group: Head of HC Tech and Talent Intelligence at Sanlam, says cloud adoption will continue to accelerate over the next two years. “We are moving aggressively towards a cloud-first strategy, including payroll migration, data platform evolution, and broader business integration initiatives. Our focus is on how we build scalable platforms and data capabilities that position us for the future.”
As part of this strategy, Sanlam is piloting SAP Datasphere-related capabilities and is progressing towards broader business data cloud initiatives planned over the coming years. The organisation is also exploring how SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP agents, and Joule capabilities can support orchestration, analytics, and employee-related workflows across the employee life cycle.
Alongside its platform modernisation efforts, Sanlam is re-evaluating core HR services and processes, including employee experience, employee relations, and document management, while strengthening its talent intelligence and people analytics capabilities to support better workforce planning and predictive decision-making. The Talent Intelligence function has matured significantly from reports and dashboards to trends, insights and predictive analytics. A key achievement has been the development of a solution to measure productivity across the various Sanlam business entities.
Intelligent automation is also playing an increasing role across areas such as service management, payments, compliance, and administrative HR functions, alongside the digitisation of compliance related scorecards like skills development to improve planning, monitoring and achievement of compliance targets. This has allowed Sanlam to service an increased customer base with a greater service offering at reduced costs.
Govindsamy says the transformation journey remains ongoing rather than a once-off implementation project. “The next phase of our journey is focused on accelerating cloud propagation, strengthening analytics and data capabilities, and embedding intelligent automation more deeply into the business. Success depends not only on technology, but on sustained leadership sponsorship, adoption, and preparing the workforce for the future.”
Nazia Pillay, Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, says: “As organisations modernise their workforce strategies, there is growing recognition that human capital transformation depends on more than digitising HR processes. It requires an integrated foundation that combines cloud, data, analytics and intelligent technologies to support better decision-making, stronger employee experiences, and greater organisational agility. Sanlam’s ongoing transformation journey reflects how forward-looking organisations are building scalable, future-ready HR environments that can evolve alongside changing business and workforce requirements.”