Version 1 Delivers Crucial Application Modernisation Project for Insurance Provider

Our customer is one of the largest player for Income Protection (IP) insurance in their home country, providing this service to some of their country’s largesto rganisations. Their application for managing these claims was aging and out of support. From a technology perspective it was proving difficult for the company to address cyber vulnerabilities as they became known due to the age of the technology and from a business perspective. They were also restricted in their ability to capitalise on market trends and operational efficiencies.

If these challenges were not addressed, the customer risked being at a competitive disadvantage and, in a worst-case scenario, suffering major application outages which risked reputational damage and potential regulatory issues. The proposal was to move to a state-of-the-art cloud-based solution including a modernised integration framework.

The key goals were:

• Move to a cloud-based SaaS solution enabling best-in-class data security and ensuring that application software would be regularly updated to remain current
• To implement a state-of-the-art application that would enable the business to leverage technology innovations, e.g. data-driven patterns for automatic claim handling, and to increase operational efficiency
• Deliver a state-of-the-art integration framework that both enabled the new product to integrate with other critical legacy applications and also positioned the customer to leverage this framework for other applications

Version 1 played a key role in the delivery of this project, providing expertise across a range of skill sets.

• We provided the overall Programme Manager who directed the programme from beginning to end, managing senior internal stakeholders and delivery from external vendors.
• Advisory Services – we brought together experts from across our business to work with the customer to advise them on how best to architect and design the overall solution, ultimately recommending Microsoft Azure and Logic Apps to build their new integration platform (iPaaS)
• Process Design – we provided business analyst expertise to help the customer design their “to be” processes for the new world and to assist them in trying to leverage value from the new product that they were investing in.
• Technology Build – we provided all of the resources and expertise to build and implement the new integration framework on MS Azure using Logic Apps. Indeed we also assisted the customer in leveraging this investment by using the new framework on other projects outside of the IP Claims project.
• Testing and QA – where required we brought our test expertise to bear to help the customer establish a test process to ensure a quality delivery.

The solution was ultimately delivered end to end with full customer adoption. The SaaS product deployed and the associated modernized integration platform have resolved the technology and infrastructure risks that Irish Life was facing. The integration platform has already demonstrated that it has enterprise-wide use and is already being used to deliver modernisation initiatives outside of the IP Claims project.

The IP Claims project was a major application modernisation initiative that offered the customer an opportunity to reinvent their integration architecture to follow a more cloud-first, decoupled, secure and scalable model. The Version1 team was key drivers and enablers of this approach. The key aspects are:

• Introduced the customer to a new event-driven architectural approach to integration. Giving the customer power to untangle their tightly coupled and current claims ecosystem.
• Provided a suite of integration patterns to the customers business architecture team to allow a consistent approach to integration with Azure iPaaS.
• Using Azure iPaaS at the heart of the integration, becoming early adopters of new single tenant Logic apps. Developing our own suite of pipelines and templates for the build and deployment to fill a gap not yet catered for by Microsoft.
• We created a robust and extendable error-handling framework to deal with integration point/system availability issues (filling a gap not provided by Microsoft)
• Automated generation of dashboards and alerting, which are now being rolled out as standard to other projects in the customer’s organisation.
• Allowed the customer to release the power of their legacy systems in a more seamless and scalable fashion

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