How do you unlock the data treasure chest from decade’s worth of insurance claims and policy history to deliver a competitive 21st century client experience? This is the challenge insurance companies are facing today. The answer to modernizing legacy insurance applications is simpler than you think.
Digital transformation is the right strategy for maintaining relevance and competitiveness in the insurance industry. Extending insurance quotes, policy look-ups, and other functions to consumers through mobile and web applications is a requirement for providing a great customer experience that retains customers and grows their loyalty. But, how do you deliver these capabilities without introducing complexity and disruption to your existing IT systems? There’s a fast and simple path to crafting this type of omni-channel, focused digital transformation. It’s through the use of a low-code development platform that easily integrates to core mainframe insurance applications.
Business-Level Versus Technology-Based APIs
Low-code solutions such as the HCL Volt MX platform rapidly meet the evolving needs and requirements of a fast-moving generation of consumers, agents and partners. To reduce risk and accelerate change, a solid integration with core transaction and client systems running on mainframe is essential. These proven back-end legacy insurance applications hold valuable data. They also have the ability to securely process transactions at lightning-fast speeds. Connecting a modern, fast, front-end to a complex enterprise back-end is best done using loosely coupled business-level APIs, interfaces built for business workflow and transaction expediency, not tightly coupled, traditional technology APIs dependent upon technological artifacts of systems and data repositories. This video explains the differences between these API types:
A key part of modernizing legacy insurance applications is orchestration. A simple consumer request, such as policy quote or claim submission, often triggers dozens or hundreds of enterprise system transactions. A good integration point is one that handles this scenario in an optimal fashion. HostBridge benchmark data consistently shows that mainframe-side orchestration of these individual transactions is the most efficient way to accomplish this task. It reduces mainframe CPU cycles, keeps CPU costs in check while ensuring real-time, or near-real, time responses.
Leveraging Modernization APIs in Low-Code Platforms
API design is at the center of this approach. When an API is built for business level requests, it simplifies the development of the front-end applications. It significantly reduces, if not completely eliminates, the need for enterprise systems validation and regression testing. Most importantly, it dramatically shortens the time to implement a new front-end application. In a recent webinar, we successfully demonstrated just this. Working with our colleagues from HCL Software, we were able to show in minutes how to use an existing mainframe API to create a brand-new mobile app without any changes to the core system. This brief but effective demonstration outlines a proven path to digital transformation for the insurance industry. It has already been proven by both the HCL Software Volt MX solution and our own HostBridge JavaScript engine.
Combining a low-code platform with business-level mainframe native APIs can dramatically accelerate digital transformation. It’s ideal for insurers that rely heavily on their legacy application portfolio for accurate and timely insurance quotes and policy information. A low-code and API approach makes this information available to consumers, agents or partners in the blink of an eye and at a fraction of cost.
Read a low-code case study from the insurance industry. To learn more about modernizing legacy insurance applications, just reach out to us using the contact information found at the bottom of this page.