Digital Transformation of a business platform

The Digital Transformation of
an Insurance Business Platform

Modernization

How we modernized an Insurance Business Platform
to handle new business models and improve
customer engagement without disrupting
the core business process.

Industry Insurance

Geography South East Asia

Timeline Product deployed. On-going support.

TEMPLATE BASED
CUSTOMER FACING
APPLICATIONS

MICROSERVICES
BASED ARCHITECTURE

CONTAINER BASED
DEPLOYMENT MODEL

INTEGRATION LAYER
FOR INTEGRATING
LEGACY SYSTEM APIS

REFACTORED
LEGACY SYSTEM
INTERFACES

Background

Our client was struggling with legacy systems accumulated over the years. The core business process depended on this implementation that evolved over multiple iterations. While the current system was taking care of the basic, day to day activities, they were missing out big on the powerful new capabilities made possible by modern systems. New products were flooding the market every day and these legacy systems were unable to keep up.

The problem. How to bring powerful new capabilities to the existing environment? Considering how big an investment these systems were over the years, our priority was to integrate the various layers and add new capabilities for new generation products, consumer insights, customer support and marketing. All this without disrupting the core business process.

Our Approach

Like all our projects, we start with a thorough evaluation of the idea, the requirements and the existing systems so that there is a shared understanding of the objectives with the client. Based on these objectives, we are able to devise a strategy to carry out the modernization process without disruptions. In this case the key objectives were driven by marketing needs.

Key Objectives

Pre-project Consultation

Evaluation.

A thorough evaluation of the existing system revealed multiple technology stacks without proper documentation. It made our task difficult, considering how diverse these systems were.

Some of these were acquired and others were from vendors. This made centralised data aggregation and generation of customer usage insights a challenge. There were monolithic applications with no standard REST/SOAP API to interface it with, duplicate systems with similar functionalities.

You don’t have to break It, to make it new. Read more about our Legacy System Modernization strategy.

The Proposal. After the pre-project consultation we were able to present a solution that tackled the shared objectives. Along with the solution, a well-defined execution strategy with projected timelines and costing was also included.

Solution

We came up with a phase-wise plan for modernization so that the core business process wouldn’t be interrupted. Our objectives could be broadly classified into two categories. The first was the integration of the legacy systems and the second was adding new capabilities. Since these two categories were closely intertwined, careful planning was necessary to keep the core business processes intact.

Implementation

Phase 1

Before we started working on the backend, the core business processes of the system like Product Management, Purchase Management and Claims Processing were wrapped and integrated into a new platform.

Phase 2

Our client catered to different markets and every time a new product or feature was launched, region specific adaptations had to be made. This not only made the process much slower, but made it more difficult than it had to be.

We introduced a template driven front-end application approach that solved this problem. Since the core business processes were live the whole time, we adopted a DevOps method of implementation, which meant working closely with the client’s team to align development, operations and quality engineering. This meant product rollouts were faster than ever with minimal downtime. And because of the clean and configurable interface, the user experience was simply better for the client and the end-user alike. Ensuring a faster, stable release with exciting new capabilities.

More importantly, all the necessary cyber security and regulatory requirements crucial for this industry were up to code so that the system was ready for any kind regulatory or system architecture audit.

Phase 3

The strategic modernization made it possible for the company to introduce products they were unable to offer till then because of the limitations in the system.

The evolved platform supported faster rollouts and had user-friendly dashboards to keep track of consumer behaviour insights. The Marketing team could start campaigns based on the purchasing trends right from the system. Leveraging the new usage insights they could also initiate Customer Loyalty reward programs.

Enhanced troubleshooting capabilities were also part of the new system so that the consultants could immediately go into a troubleshooting routine to identify the issue and correct it in the event of any user reported problem, without the help of a developer.

Impact

New markets. New business models.

The upgraded system made it possible for the company to explore a whole new category of products for an evolving market place. Products like ‘On Demand Insurance’ for fitness centres to cab hailing services which relied on a different business model.

A Partnership Ecosystem

With the help of the modernized platform, our client could form ‘micro-markets’ by bringing in unconventional partners from outside their domain. This meant partnering with food delivery applications, cab-hailing services, fitness centres and a host of other next generation services, to widen the scope of their business.

Improved Customer Experience

Improved tools meant multi-channel customer engagement and a modern user interface. These tools were tailor made for the consumers with better user experience, efficient troubleshooting and seamless support.

Features

Template based customer facing applications
Micro Service based Architecture
Container based Deployment Model
Integration layer for Integrating legacy system APIs
Refactored Legacy System Interfaces

Technologies

status

Product Deployed.On-going support.

How we modernized an Insurance Business Platform
to handle new business models and improve
customer engagement without disrupting
the core business process.