Ageas

AWS Customer name

Ageas

APN Partner name

CDL

AWS Customer challenge

Ageas is one of the largest general insurers in the United Kingdom, providing insurance to almost five million customers. It's focused on growing in its core markets - that is electronically traded personal lines insurance.

As a longstanding user of CDL's Proteus Insurer Hosted Pricing (IHP) solution as its strategic platform for mass market product distribution and dynamic pricing control, Ageas recognised the benefits of migrating to the cloud as a transformational step as the insurer continues to work smarter and faster, responding to market conditions and giving broker partners faster access to competitive rates. As well as delivering cost savings by way of licensing arrangements, the move has built scalability, resilience and speed of performance for the longer term.

How AWS was leveraged as part of the solution

CDL is a Differentiated Software Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), and its globally recognised cloud capabilities and track record in deploying to the cloud have seen it achieve a number of designations, including AWS PrivateLink Service Ready and Amazon RDS Ready for business applications.

Working closely with the Ageas team, CDL supported the insurer to migrate the Proteus IHP solution to the cloud, as part of a new, multi-year deal marking the insurer's first deployment to AWS.

Proteus processes over 164 million transactions per day, using AWS services to ensure resilience and scalability when storing and processing data. These include Multiple Availability Zones and the Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to enable applications to be run in a managed cluster of Amazon instances, as well as Amazon S3 object storage to give access to the same highly scalable, reliable and fast data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Self-healing services operate on optimal compute resources via capacity providers, while AWS Enterprise Support, 24/7/365 monitoring and technical collaboration allows the highest levels of availability.

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is used to give Ageas assurance that the latest security standards are protecting IP and customer data, while supporting international compliance requirements.

Outcomes

The migration to the AWS-hosted IHP hub enables Ageas to respond to market conditions instantly, making changes to products and pricing in real time, and giving broker partners faster access to competitive rates.

The scalability of the new solution also means Ageas is able to easily expand its cloud infrastructure, significantly increasing opportunities to drive growth and profitability for its broker partners.

Integrations were completed with all Ageas software house partners to give full market coverage and ensure efficient and timely product release: changes can now be deployed instantly rather than in line with the standard six-week software house cycle ensuring brokers, and their customers are now immediately able access accurate rates.

Ageas' data and analytics capabilities have also been boosted through the move, which saw CDL complete an integration with Ageas' data lake and warehouse, giving visibility of all business transactions in one location and delivering powerful business intelligence functionality.

Adam Clarke, Chief Underwriting Officer, said: "The move to Amazon Web Services for our Insurer Hosted Pricing is one of the ways we are supporting our desire to grow in our chosen market of personal lines sold through brokers. It also supports both our medium to long term goals in terms of building capabilities and resilience, and realising short-term benefits through licensing savings.

Mark Collins, Chief Information Officer, added "This was our first deployment to AWS and we were delighted with how smoothly it went. The transition was seamless, giving us the confidence to accelerate plans for the migration of other business critical systems to the cloud."

Date the project entered production

July 2021

Architecture diagrams

Third party applications or solutions used

CDL uses leading-edge monitoring tools, such as Dynatrace, to monitor the CDL layer of services built on top of AWS. Dynatrace uses machine learning, auto-discovery and dependency mapping to automatically analyse the dynamically scaling estate it is monitoring.

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