CONTRIBUTOR

The international insurance giant, Zurich, a household name, is the latest global business to roll out two new enterprise-wide solutions. Its aim is to drive a comprehensive program of digital transformation to improve its applications development process and iterate faster, and more efficiently.

 

A New Portal to Improve UX

Using Mendix  —  a Siemens business and global leader in low-code development  —  software program, Zurich leveraged low-code to build a new portal. More than 1.5 million Zurich customers will now have easy access to their accounts — pensions, investments and insurance — via the new “My Plans Portal”, enabling them to log in and obtain all their information efficiently in one location. The new portal will totally transform user experiences.

The Mendix application relays back to Zurich’s Salesforce platform, ensuring tasks and activities are incorporated into a workflow. This eliminates the previous issue of necessitating calls to customers if some information is missing or out of date, as happened previously under the old system. Now, customer experience is vastly improved with a more positive experience, and everything customers need is in one place.

Terrorism Data Capture

Additionally, the global insurer also rolled out a new Terrorism Data Capture solution which was built in an incredibly short timeframe just 12 weeks. This solution will rebuild a legacy-based policy application that calculates insurance premiums and captures data for terrorism coverage  insurance purchased by property owners to cover their potential losses and liabilities that might occur due to terrorist activities.

Generating millions in revenue in gross written premiums, terrorism coverage is a huge aspect of the business for Zurich. Head of UK DevOps for Zurich, Barrington Clarke said, “Our first project with Mendix was to overhaul the legacy application that managed the terrorism underwriting process. Using Mendix, we replaced the legacy system and built the Terrorism Data Capture (TDC) application in just 12 weeks. This new application provides a unified workflow to reduce manual processing, increases reporting accuracy, speeds up the preparation of terrorism submissions, and provides a better experience for the underwriting community.”

Paul Fondie, global industry principal for insurance at Mendix, said, “Zurich is a great example of an insurer using technology to provide its customers and employees with the best experience possible. Low-code can provide organizations in this industry with the tools they need to drive digital transformation. The pandemic has accelerated the need for these digital solutions, with more customers moving online than ever before.”

What’s Next?

A long-term project is the next one. Zurich is working on a complete overhaul of legacy Lotus Notes applications. More than 1,000 such applications are currently handling business processes, from simple forms that can easily be converted using automated processes, to complex UI workflows that are more difficult to redevelop. This may be a long-term project but will eventually be much faster and more efficient than the alternative of using Java. That would take at least five times longer and therefore would not have been as cost-efficient.

Clarke said, “These Lotus Notes applications are very old. Some were developed more than five years ago and no longer fit the operating model of our business. This has caused numerous problems, including shadow IT, as employees look for quicker workarounds. Mendix provides us with the ability to replace, amend and update these applications, because low-code makes it so quick to do these sorts of activities.”

Should Other Businesses Follow Suit?

It’s certainly astute to stay abreast of technology trends impacting the insurance industry and what your organization can do to stay competitive. The Mendix platform is built to both accelerate app development and to promote collaboration between IT teams and business. The three goals of Mendix can be used to improve any business that wishes to reinvent and scale with the use of digital transformation.

They include the following:

“Make with More – broadening an enterprise’s development capability to conquer the software development bottleneck

Make it Smart – making apps with rich native experiences that are intelligent, proactive and contextual 

Make at Scale – modernize core systems and build large app portfolios to keep pace with business growth.”