Venerable is a privately held company with business operations in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Des Moines, Iowa. Venerable owns and manages legacy variable annuity businesses acquired from other entities.

Challenge

When Dustin Kemp took on the challenging role of Manager of Security Operations and Recovery Management at Venerable, he was aware there weren’t yet processes in place for business continuity or crisis management. 

The urgency of the situation became clear when Venerable’s office in Des Moines, Iowa, was shut down due to a water main break. With blocks around the office completely inaccessible, Kemp needed a way to communicate to employees about the office closure. Call trees were set up to try to alert employees, but that was unsuccessful.

Venerable needed reliable communications and risk intelligence capabilities that would keep them up-to-date on critical events that could affect their offices and call centers — and enable them to effectively reach remote workers and contractors in several states and countries. With just one other security employee to mitigate and monitor potential threats and risks, Kemp needed real-time visibility into all of his facilities and employees no matter their location.

Solution

Venerable looked to OnSolve® to provide fast, accurate and relevant intelligence. 

With OnSolve Risk Intelligence and Critical Communications, Venerable has greater insights into events that could impact any worker or company location during any type of critical event. 

Venerable can: 

• Monitor in real time the office locations, call centers, data centers of tier 1 vendors and the homes of C-level executives who work remotely.
• Quickly and easily send alerts to employees and contractors about severe weather, office closures and more.
• Leverage a COVID-19 dashboard for high-level insights into travel locations of the C-Suite (instead of pulling information every 12 hours from different websites), including the ability to create decks and newsletters for the C-Suite. 
  • Taking the COVID dashboards a step further, employees are now offered complimentary travel reports before traveling, for business or for leisure.
• Isolate the data that matters most using robust filtering capabilities, so Kemp receives actionable information about events and locations that matter to Venerable.
• Send two-way alerts from the scenario library, allowing for responses from employees and the ability to monitor responses (and requests for assistance) via a dashboard.

Results

Venerable enjoys peace of mind that employees are safe, no matter where they are in the world, along with the ability to maintain operational agility with its customer experience center. Whether it’s severe weather like a derecho storm in Iowa, Hurricane Irma aftermath in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, or a heavy blizzard, Venerable leverages OnSolve Critical Communications and Risk Intelligence to protect employees and contractors all over the globe with:

• Flexibility to send an alert from anywhere to any employee
• Ability to receive and monitor responses via two-way messaging capabilities
• Enhanced business continuity through the ability to detect and monitor telecommunications vendors for outages that could impact clients’ ability to complete transactions
• Ability to make proactive decisions to protect people, facilities and vendors through fast, accurate and relevant intelligence

❝ “Venerable has seen significant value in the system. It gives me the power to monitor the world from anywhere and rapidly share the details with my senior leadership team, enable efficient decision making.”
— Dustin Kemp, Manager, Security Operations and Recovery Management

Real-World Use Case  

Typhoon Rai hit the Philippines in December 2021, placing Venerable’s call center teams at risk. Two days before the typhoon hit, Kemp was alerted through OnSolve Risk Intelligence that a tropical depression had formed, giving him ample time to alert employees not to report to work, and shift resources to Manila — before the tropical depression strengthened into a life-threatening typhoon.

The customer experience center maintained structural integrity, never lost power, and critical services were transferred to associates in Manila — enabling Venerable to continue normal business operations.

 Having the critical storm data two days prior not only helped keep employees safe, but also kept operations going, ensuring clients would be able to access funds and complete transactions without any holds or complications.

  ❝“OnSolve’s relationship management is top=notch and I appreciate their attentiveness to Venerable’s crisis management needs.”
—Dustin Kemp, Manager, Security Operations and Recovery Management

Visit OnSolve.com to learn more.