Customer
Achieving Insurance Digital Transformation With Akana
This top 10 insurer chose Akana to help with a large-scale IT systems modernization. With $22 billion a year in revenue, they're no small player. They primarily offer supplemental insurance covering customer gaps. The Insurer leverages both agents and brokers as their primary channel. They sell to and through human resource departments. With brand recognition on par with Coca-Cola, they've only been able to penetrate 5 percent of the global employee market. Using Akana, they sought to enable an API and microservices architecture.
Akana Helps With ...
- Automate Agent and Partner Onboarding
- Design and Document APIs
- Security Across APIs Internally and Externally
The Challenge: IT In Need of Modernization
The Insurer wanted to modernize their IT systems. The sought increase agility through APIs and microservices giving them flexibility to:
- Change their product offerings in response to market demands.
- Optimize the buying processes for their consumers. And streamline the selling process for agents.
- Penetrate a greater percentage of the market.
Prior to modernization, the Insurer’s infrastructure consisted of traditional heavyweight ESBs and a substantial .NET backend. The time to build and deploy changes was six months or longer. This was not as responsive as the Insurer’s needs. In addition, the risks to deploy changes were often high. Their applications were built as large monoliths. This required changes to be deployed at the same time due to the availability of deployment windows.
The Insurer’s vision for modernized IT systems included:
- Microservices: Re-architecting their applications and service into microservices.
- APIs: Removing manual processes and optimizing interactions with agents and partners through an API management platform.
- Security API Gateway and API Developer Portal: Handling API security exposures both internally and externally.
- DevOps: Changing from a waterfall development process to agile/scrum development process.
The Solution: Advanced API Management for a Microservices Architecture
They needed to go beyond API basics. The Insurer chose the on-premises Akana platform with a hybrid option. As the foundation of their modernization strategy, the Akana platform provides a standard and configurable way to:
- Manage the portfolio and lifecycle of the microservices.
- Automate agent and partner onboarding with workflow.
- Design and document APIs.
- Aggregate services to form new APIs.
- Apply security consistently across APIs internally and externally.
The Results
The Insurer currently has the Akana API Gateway capabilities in production. It is working to simplify portfolio and lifecycle management for a range of microservices. They are working on branding the developer portal and defining customized workflows for partner onboarding. They plan to establish an Agile development process. This will be enabled by the portfolio management and DevOps capabilities of the Akana Platform.
Next Steps
Are you an insurance carrier leveraging APIs to stay competitive as the industry evolves? Are you getting the most out of your API platform?
Find out how the implementation of a properly-managed API strategy can increase the efficiency of claims processing with a free assessment.