Trasti began its operations in March 2021 with the introduction of a motor third-party liability offering. Trasti operates in Poland under the terms of the EU’s freedom to provide financial services (FoS) as General Agent for Zavarovalnica Triglav, which is Southern Europe’s largest insurer based in Slovenia, in partnership with global reinsurer Swiss Re.

Makeitright has developed software for the company using the FlexiBlocks transactional system hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. This is the first such commercial implementation in Poland, which the well-known Rankomat.pl portal considered one of the best implementations in the history of integration with this platform.

In the case study, we share the challenges we faced and the problems we had to solve to bring the new insurer to market.

“Poland is the first and most important market where we want to implement our InsurTech model. We believe that insurance products are local, but the processes that support them can be global. This is also how we are designing our operating model and technologies.” – says Artur Olech, CEO of Trasti.

Target

Our goal was to launch a new insurance company and bring it to the Polish market.

Four elements were key for the client:

• Entering the market with an offer in the shortest possible time (maximum 6 months).
• Limiting the investment contribution (the client did not want to buy servers and the whole system with a license, he wanted the costs to be spread over time).
• Launching the insurance system in the cloud (gave the possibility of rapid deployment, without having to build all the infrastructure, such as buying servers).
• Integration with the company’s largest partners. Trasti is working with global reinsurer Swiss Re, among others.

Enter comparison sites rankomat.co.uk and mubi.co.uk.

In the Polish insurance market, diversified sales across multiple channels and establishing credibility with the most popular online comparison sites rankomat.pl and mubi.pl are key. Potential customers go to them to compare prices and see how much the selected insurance might cost. It’s important to get the quote back to the customer quickly, as the timing of receiving the quote is crucial to the customer’s purchasing decision and choice of insurer.

Makeitright faced a technological challenge, i.e. adapting the system to independently scale individual components depending on the characteristics of the traffic observed with end customers – that is, customers in online channels and the sales network. The system should maintain stable response times regardless of the volume of queries, while allowing it to handle load peaks and variable volumes of queries occurring at different times of the day. All scaling should take place in the background, while maintaining cost efficiency and in a manner that is unnoticeable to end users.

The key elements to meet these challenges were:

• Integrate the FlexiBlocks system with online comparison sites by exposing a number of API services to support the full sales process;
• All modules involved in the sales process were based on scalable Azure cloud components. We used both PaaS and IaaS solutions for this purpose. This allowed us to adapt all the systems used in the sales channels to the changing traffic characteristics;
• Additional support in the area of efficient scaling and implementation of changes with minimized “downtime” was the use of containerization and orchestration based on Docker and Kubernetes technologies;
• Introducing multilevel caching to minimize the load at the data layer, which is often the least efficient part of the system
• Running a system that returned the price to the comparison engine in about 3 seconds (the client’s goal was a maximum of 5 seconds) despite the fact that many queries to external systems such as UFG, CEPiK and other expert systems were performed in the background;
• All external services have been and continue to be actively monitored so that we can proactively respond to problems that arise with our partners.

For Trasti’s client, we built a comprehensive system in six months, which is twice as fast as the competition (average implementation time for competitors – 1 year).

We were able to achieve such fast deployment time thanks to the off-the-shelf FlexiBlocks system and its integration with the Microsoft Azure cloud.
The team behind the successful implementation for Trasti previously guided BRE Insurance, MBank’s former insurance brand, through the entire process.

Our solution for Trasti consists of:

• FlexiBlocks’ proprietary back-end system that handles the data processed in the system;
• Trasti’s dedicated customer communication system (front-end);
• an integrated transaction system for the insurer available as a service in the Azure cloud;
• A unified system for managing an insurance company that handles, among other things, claims settlement or after-sales service. The system has been integrated with the client’s largest partners;
• BrokerUFG solution, which supports the client’s communication with UFG and CEPiK;
• An innovative interface in the agency channel that is functional, convenient and clear to the user, as well as aesthetically pleasing;
• CasePro system, a computational engine for data.

Next steps in cooperation

1. entering the agency sales channel

Many companies in the Polish market have their own insurance systems that support all sales channels. Makeitright faced the challenge of implementing an insurance system for Trasti so that insurance agents could also use it.

We will introduce a system that integrates with ISI, a solution implemented in several insurance agency networks.
Agents will work on the ISI solution with which FlexiBlocks integrates.

2. entry into direct sales (direct sale)

Makeitright will guide the client through the process of creating its own portal, which every person who wants insurance will go through. Makeitright built the software for us according to the latest design principles. FlexiBlocks transactional system is innovative, meets all quality and security standards in the financial market.