Introduction

A multinational finance and insurance corporation, headquartered in NYC, wanted to modernize their life insurance customer experience. Because their commercial underwriting systems were outdated by 20-30 years, it was difficult to create a great consumer experience or implement system upgrades easily.

Challenge

Levvel was brought in to drive the modernization of these antiquated systems, as the client wanted to modernize their underwriting platform with a more flexible application that would allow them to launch new products and features quickly. The legacy application was built on an end-of-life platform that was no longer supported and unable to be maintained in its current state.

The insurance client was worried about:

• Reputational and financial risks associated with re-platforming.
• The security risk of a new system getting compromised.
• Loss of customer data and trust in the event of a breach.
• Heavy dependence on legacy technology.
• Lack of supporting technology and developer talent.
• Tech debt—the cost of fixing the problem was increasing every year.

Approach

Levvel’s mission was to re-architect and reshape the client’s current platform. Using application development and enterprise architecture expertise coupled with insurance industry knowledge, the goal was to modernize the legacy commercial underwriting platform with state-of-the-art web technology and business services.

The recommended approach included:

• Implementing custom technology architecture based on the client’s current workloads and systems in a phased approach.
• Re-architecting the system in a way where the client could support it over its lifetime without needing third-party support managing the service.
• Improving performance of the application.
• Crafting client solutions with mitigating risk in mind.

Results

• The re-architectured platform was successfully rolled out, which would ultimately create the re-platforming gold standard for this client and the hundreds of applications the client supported.

• New architecture also allowed application performance to be improved for functions that couldn’t be tuned in the previous version, resulting in a much better user experience for underwriters.

• Re-platforming inspired the client to use this project as a playbook for future modernization efforts within their company, including another project with Levvel focused on serving the unique needs of their high net worth customers.

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You can access the PDF here.