CLIENT OVERVIEW
The client is a specialty insurer based in the Midwest with more than 100 years of experience underwriting both personal and commercial lines of business.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As part of its 2023 strategy, the insurer wanted to enable the rapid rollout of new products while providing an enhanced customer and agent experience, both in terms of making new features quickly available and in overall application performance.
The insurer had a broad range of applications to support quoting, portals, and core capabilities that needed to be streamlined to improve efficiency as well as the user experience for customers and agents. These included six applications for quoting, legacy portals, a portal specifically for personal lines, a microportal for quick pay, and a Guidewire-based portal for producers.
All of these applications, as well as the integrations between the insurer’s systems and strategic partners’ platforms, embedded insurance partners, and other platforms, had left the insurer with an overly complex back end involving more than 14 engagement applications and on-premises core systems with more than 45 end points.
Due to the monolithic nature of the existing application architecture, it became challenging for the insurer to add new features and onboard new partners. In addition, speed, agility, availability, scalability, performance, and security were all becoming increasing concerns as the user base continued to grow.
SOLUTION OFFERED
The insurer decided to use its quote consolidation effort as an opportunity to streamline its existing integrations and enable automated delivery where possible to accelerate its delivery, enhance the customer and agent experience, and improve its embedded insurance offering.
The insurer turned to ValueMomentum to consolidate the fragmented technical landscape, its varying and sometimes redundant business logic, and numerous integrations.
The insurer first underwent a discovery phase to analyze its application ecosystem and how it worked with the Guidewire core system, how the API life cycle was managed, what technology platforms were involved, and the existing implementation process. Applying ValueMomentum’s Cloud-Native Integration Framework allowed for simpler integration with third-party providers and enabled configuration-based integrations.
Next, ValueMomentum’s application engineering team recommended a solution architecture for each area that focused on how to enable the organization’s business goals, including an engagement API for each of the 14 different engagement channels that could communicate with a streamlined and business-aligned API layer.
Using ValueMomentum’s Domain API Reference Solution enabled the teams to move forward with a domain-driven design that allowed for partner-specific customization with considerations such as scalability and API governance built into the framework. Deploying ValueMomentum’s customizable, pre-built CI/CD scripts also helped the project team with faster deployment and infrastructure automation.
The teams utilized a Microsoft Azure container to enable the Kubernetes-based API layer, .NET to design the framework, and the Dapr platform for the API template. The design of the new API layer, including the discovery phase, took eight months to complete.
The API life cycle is now automated from creation and design all the way through management and publishing.
VALUE DELIVERED
This project succeeded in simplifying the back-end integrations for the carrier’s engagement channels and partner platform access and improving the portal experience for agents and customers. Building out API life-cycle automation and tools such as API templates gave the insurer a pathway to future scalability.
The optimized application infrastructure provided the insurer with a modern, flexible, and resilient API-driven platform that will allow the company to bring products and features to market quickly as well as accelerate its partner onboarding.
The API life cycle is now automated from creation and design all the way through management and publishing, and the API template provided the insurer’s team with pre-built components that automate non-functional and infrastructure concerns while enabling consistent, accelerated, and configuration-driven implementation.
Thanks to the new application and API layer foundation, the carrier is better positioned to expand its business rapidly, integrate more readily with partners’ platforms, and grow its market share.
