Founded in 1957, Liberty Group has grown from a South African life insurer to a pan-African financial services company offering asset management, investment, insurance and health products to more than three million people across the continent. “Liberty has always been a highly innovative company,” says Liberty Group CIO Benjamin Marais. “However, we lost a little bit of that spirit in the last few years. We were still relying on legacy systems and paper-based processes. We wanted to get our innovative DNA back.” With Microsoft 365 already in place, the company sought to empower employees to fully leverage the technology at their disposal – for themselves, for their teams, and for the business. “After our staff started using basic Microsoft 365 applications such as Teams, we decided to go further by organising a hackathon that focused specifically on Power Apps,” explains Masechaba Wessie, Lead Specialist: Business Transformation at Liberty Group. “We wanted to show that they didn’t need a technology background to build an innovative app that solved a particular business problem. Solutions could come from anywhere in the business.”