Manulife Uses MongoDB Atlas to Increase Performance and Reduce Costs

Founded in 1887, Manulife is a Canada-based insurance, investment, banking, and wealth management company that serves large, international customers across industries. In 2023, the company achieved more than $1 trillion in funds under management. To expand into new markets, Manulife moved quickly to adopt cloud technologies.

One of Manulife’s offerings, iFunds, is a customer-facing investment and trading service newly available in six Asian markets: Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. To establish a strong market presence and meet the needs of its new customers, the company needed to deliver solutions at an accelerated pace — up to four times faster than operations in North America — while delivering a consistent experience on its public-facing website. Additionally, because Manulife holds a prominent position in global banking as a Tier 1 financial institution, it was doubly important for the company to adhere to ever-changing financial regulations across all six markets.

Manulife’s previous cloud-based document database did not meet the platform’s technical and customer-related requirements. Therefore, the company sought a new solution to optimize its data management. During its search, Manulife focused on four key criteria:

1. Scalability: The new solution needed to scale horizontally and vertically to support the application’s frontend and accommodate the platform’s growing needs.
2. Flexibility: A flexible schema was essential to enable the team to quickly adapt the data model in response to changing government regulations.
3. Performance: High performance was crucial to maintaining Manulife’s reputation as a business-to-consumer company.
4. Time to market: Manulife wanted a solution that could accelerate time to market, enabling faster delivery of business results.

After considering several options, Manulife chose MongoDB Atlas, which met its requirements. When the company used sample data to run tests comparing MongoDB Atlas with Manulife’s original database solution, the results showed that MongoDB Atlas was faster and less expensive. “We strive to propose reliable solutions that can sustain growth without performance issues,” said Paramdeep Saini, Director of Architecture at Manulife. “Cost was not a driving factor, but with MongoDB, we got the best solution at a much lower price than other available technologies.”

Manulife completed its migration to MongoDB Atlas in 2023. Manulife’s performance tests, which consisted of a representative dataset of approximately 65 million records, showed the following:

• Ingestion time was 7.2 times faster.
• Operations per hour were 2.4 times higher.
• Read response time was 4.7 ms , —5.9 times faster than its previous solution.
• Data management costs were reduced by 3.5 times.
• Costs were reduced by 25% in one use case.

Before MongoDB Atlas, Manulife’s solution replicated data across regions through multiple database instances for high availability purposes. This led to inconsistent reads, stale data, and data loss. Additionally, it made adhering to regulations difficult, which is crucial in Manulife’s industry. The financial institution must comply with various international and local financial regulations; any compliance failures could potentially result in penalties, reputational damage, and loss of customer trust. “Our use case is cross-market,” said Saini. “We had to ensure that there were absolutely no consistency issues.”

In contrast, MongoDB Atlas offers robust, multiregion deployments that have tunable consistency rules at the query level. This provides stable, linearizable read guarantees and ensures policy-based data distribution with virtually no chance for data loss. For Manulife, this means the company has greater data integrity and reliability, and it can more easily comply with cross-country data sovereignty laws. The out-of-the-box capabilities of MongoDB Atlas ensure that developers won’t have to handle read/write failures.

Manulife was also able to seamlessly shift into a multicloud strategy. One of the reasons why MongoDB Atlas can provide high levels of resilience and availability is that it’s the only developer data platform that’s available on all three major public cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Manulife can span databases cross-cloud without having to worry about setting up complicated extract, transform, and load processes.

Therefore, the company is never locked into one cloud provider and doesn’t run the risk of concentrating all its data in a single location. In addition, Manulife can more easily meet new regulation requirements with multicloud capabilities. “We need to be very agile in the way we build our solutions,” said Saini. “That’s why we implemented a multicloud application platform strategy, and it’s another key reason why we chose MongoDB.”

Migrating iFunds to MongoDB Atlas helped Manulife make a powerful impact in new markets while preparing the company for future growth and challenges. After seeing improvements in performance, scalability, and costs, Manulife plans to incorporate MongoDB solutions into future use cases across more business segments and regions. Plus, with MongoDB Atlas’s multicloud capabilities, the company as a whole can continue to enhance its resilience and innovation speed.

“Delivering solutions better and faster is key in the insurance space,” said Saini. “MongoDB Atlas is our standard for creating new applications that serve our customers better.”