A non-life direct insurer in Japan

About Customer

A non-life direct insurer in Japan, a subsidiary of an international insurance group. Its main business lines are motor, motorcycle and pet insurance for personal lines. Its distribution channels are phone, aggregators, online, mobile, tied agents and white labels via motorbike dealers.

What was the goal of the project

The 20-year-old legacy system was reaching the limit of its capacity to catch up with changing and diversified customer needs. Its “spaghetti architecture” blocked off quick changes required on a competitive market. The goals of the project from an internal perspective were to simplify IT architecture, make employees work in the agile approach and allow the company to easily adapt. The aim of the project was to offer customer-centric services by simplifying and speeding up processes. It was a digital transformation project framed around Guidewire implementation, based on the agile methodology – which was unique for a project of this scale in the Japanese insurance industry.

What solution was implemented

Working closely with Sollers experts the insurer has accomplished Japan’s first successful Guidewire agile implementation project.

It has deployed a new customer-centric strategy to become the top direct insurer in the near future.

The implemented solution includes Guidewire PolicyCenter, BillingCenter and Digital as well as a number of integrations, supportive systems and migration approach and execution.

Sollers Consulting experts helped in process optimisations, redefining customer journey and promoting mobile first approach as well as in coaching the client’s team on insurance product modeling in the new system and agile approach.

The new core system makes it possible to integrate external partners, introduce changes in the system and accelerate time-to-market for new products.

As a result of the project, many customer-friendly features were implemented, including paperless communication, anonymous improved quotation for new customers, automated integrations to validate car data and customer claims history, streamlining communication with customer, and more automated processes. The new tariff model was created to allow for easy standard rates modifications and testing. New sales, policy change, and renewal process were automated with regards to customer notifications, issuing policy and sending documents to customers and notifying insurer partners if needed.

DevOps transformation

The client was used to manual deployment so the main task was to change that approach. We brought in a set of techniques and automation tools to set up and configure the environments. Because we have used Infrastructure as a code approach, we have been able to deliver a fully working test environment along with code repository and CI/CD pipelines in 2 weeks. Using OpenShift as a platform for our containers hosting GW Suite, we managed to automate and optimise the process further. Each environment level with a full set of applications and their configuration was stored as templates and parameters. This allowed us to create a new environment in less than 30 minutes if necessary. Using Jenkins as our automation tool allowed us to trigger automatic code tests, applications builds and deployments. Our solution helped developers to see the results of their work quicker and testers to respond faster to possible issues with the newly introduced features. All of this meant that we were able to deliver the first ever GW project of this scale in Japan. But the biggest success is that the client now wants to implement our solutions to all of their already existing legacy systems