Agile Product Creation & Set-Up: The INSILLION Approach to Insurance Products

Importance of agility in insurance

Product creation is a crucial process for carriers as new customer requirements and distribution channels emerge. Carriers may require new products for targeting small segments for niche products or regulatory requirements. Additionally, carriers may need to modify existing products by adding new parameters or enabling new distribution channels.

Carriers need to be quick and efficient with product creation and changes but traditional approaches to product creation require significant time and cost commitments.

The Carrier Product Creation Conundrum

One of the main concerns of carriers when they create new products is whether they will obtain a good return on their investment (ROI). New product development requires multiple attempts until carriers find the ideal product-channel mix, but if the cost of developing and launching the product exceeds the overall return from product, this ROI-burn can become a challenge for carriers when creating new products.

Traditional Approach to Product Creation

• 1Underwriters create an Excel calculator consisting of the rating & premium logic.
• 2BA teams prepare the Business Requirement Document (BRD) for the developers.
• 3IT developers convert this Excel along with the BRD into an application by coding from scratch.
• 4BA Teams test the functionality of the completed application.
• 5QC testing to check for bugs.
• 6Carriers complete the UAT.

Challenges with Traditional Approach

Resource Intensive

• This process is not only time-consuming but also cost extensive.
• Carriers may miss out on market opportunities due to the extended product development timelines.

Requirements Gaps

• IT developers may lack insurance domain understanding, resulting in products that do not meet carrier requirements.
• The gap between underwriting expertise and technical implementation can lead to extended development timelines.

Tedious Process to Modify Products

• Making changes to products is a resource-intensive task, requiring developer involvement which can add onto the technical costs.

Insurance carriers need to alter and revise their products until they find the right fit for the market requirement. But when product development requires lengthy timelines and developer resources, it becomes a challenge to make continuous changes and hit the market at the right time.

Moreover, making the product ready for distribution with APIs for integration on aggregator sites and developing portals for partners can extend the product development timelines.

Recognising the difficulty of knowledge transfer between multiple teams for product creation, INSILLION platform leverages the insurance experts (i.e.) actuary, pricing, or underwriting team’s proficiency in developing rating and premium logic in Excel to create insurance products.

INSILLION Approach to Product Creation

• Underwriters and or IT Business Analysts create a product rater Excel.
• BA’s upload the Excel to INSILLION platform.
• Assets for distribution are generated by INSILLION.
• QC Testing to check for bugs.
• Carriers complete the UAT.

Benefits of choosing INSILLION

Faster Product Cycle

• By reducing the developer resources required for product creation, INSILLION drastically cuts short the production time and gives the flexibility to configure products as per requirements.
• INSILLION is a pre-built platform that can be deployed immediately.

Simplified Product

• Stepping away from complex and rigid product constructs, INSILLION platform’s low learning curve empowers product teams to manage their premium computation methodology and product configuration through Excel and or UI-driven configuration, thus enabling them to manage rates, business rules and referrals independently.

Out-of-the-box Features

• Products created on INSILLION includes pre-built features to enable speed-to-market and modification of products after go-live.