Covéa Insurance

CDL

Covéa Insurance provides cover to over 2 million policyholders in the UK, distributing products via brokers, intermediaries, affinity brands, as well as its direct motor proposition, Provident Insurance. The agility to optimise pricing in real time, adjust rates dynamically to respond to market changes and give its partners fast access to the latest products are therefore business critical.

To achieve this for its intermediated business, Covéa required a platform that would give it full pricing control and efficient market-wide distribution, without the time-consuming process of adapting products for different technology systems or software houses.

Crucially, it needed a platform that would perform at scale and deliver the resilience, speed and security needed for high volume transactions involving personal data.

CDL's Insurer Hosted Pricing (IHP) Proteus hub has an extensive track record with UK insurers as a transformational platform, enabling them to gain in-house product control and vital speed to market, while supporting more sophisticated enrichment, underwriting and rating capabilities.

Moreover, CDL's credentials as a Differentiated Software Partner status in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) means it has globally recognised cloud capabilities, enabling it to leverage AWS services to enhance the resilience and scalability of the Proteus solution.

The Proteus hub allows Covéa to deliver dynamic pricing changes, in line with market requirements, via a self-service tool called the product deployment interface (PDI). This facilitates the upload of assets, the building of rating packages and, ultimately, the deployment of the package to the production environment.

The platform ensures the insurer has complete control for delivering a quote price to market, from something as simple as managing the insurer algorithm, all the way through to the data transformation responsible for performing a third party enrichment lookup.

The architecture takes advantage of a number of AWS services to accelerate and support CDL's engineering teams to build out customer features quickly, as follows:

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) enables applications to be run in a managed cluster of Amazon instances, ensuring resilience. CDL uses capacity providers to optimise cost by mixing compute types and it uses Amazon ECR image scanning to ensure security compliance of its images.
• Amazon S3 object storage 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. It provides a cost-effective solution for customer uploaded packages and system configuration. S3 events allow the system to trigger AWS Lambda functions in response to customer uploads.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is used as a cloud-based relational database for the metadata around the PDI, automating time-consuming administration tasks such as hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups.
• Using the autoscaling capabilities of AWS services gives Covéa a scalable platform, enabling it to respond to demand rather than having to over-provision resources to cope with peak load.
• Customer notifications are issued in response to product uploads by the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).
• All of the data for the request and response messages is made available for analytics using Kibana and the Amazon S3 based data platform.
• 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 Covéa assurance that the latest security standards are protecting IP and customer data, while supporting international compliance requirements.

The move to the AWS-hosted Proteus hub has enabled Covéa to achieve more efficient distribution and to easily distribute products to its broker partners.

The Proteus transformation layer enables software houses and business partners to integrate with the hub and seamlessly access the latest products. This eliminates the time-consuming and expensive process of making changes to adapt products for different systems.

Furthermore, its integration with enrichment providers and the Willis Towers Watson Radar Live price optimisation tool further enhances its rating capabilities, harnessing extensive data sets to profile customers more accurately and deliver the right outcomes to meet their needs.

"Use of the CDL Proteus hub enables us to deliver targeted products to our intermediaries, giving them faster access to the latest releases and driving higher value in our partnerships.

"AWS hosting of the solution gives us and our partners' significant assurance of the resilience and scalability of the Proteus hub and that it is built using some of the world's most advanced cloud technologies, offering a platform that complements our Insurance as a Service strategy."

Sue Coffey, Director of Personal Lines Distribution at Covéa Insurance

Covea and CDL use 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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