Pukka Services

CDL

After rapid growth in its MGA business following its launch, Pukka Services, part of the Freedom Group, had significantly outgrown its previous back-office solution, which lacked automation in key areas and necessitated too many workarounds and resource-intensive processes. This directly impacted its ability to respond quickly to market changes and support further business growth.

It became clear that it would need a new platform to meet its growth ambitions, and they recognised that the scalability and resilience offered by cloud-hosting was key to increasing capacity to enable expansion into new product lines, as well as sustained growth of existing lines.

Policy Manager is delivered using AWS services as software as a service (SaaS). To build the solution, CDL leveraged the benefits of a range of AWS products, including AWS Lambda, with DynamoDB for configuration storage, Amazon RDS for message storage and Amazon Athena for data queries and report generation. AWS SQS supports messaging and third-party submission queuing, with Amazon S3 used for storage and Amazon SNS as a notification service to replicate S3 objects to user S3 accounts.

CDL holds Independent Software Vendor (ISV) status within the AWS Partner Network (APN). 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.

As longstanding partners, CDL and Pukka Services worked together throughout the agile development process, based on storyboarding user needs. These included accounts reconciliation automation, integrations with partner and industry databases.

Policy Manager includes a range of fully automated features, including in/outbound EDI/XML processing, policy verification, agency management, accounts reconciliation and financial reporting, as well as pre-connected industry database integrations.

As well as eradicating costly manual workarounds and resource-intensive processes, Pukka is now able to scale up sales volumes without worrying about increased administration, with account reconciliation alone reducing from days to seconds. Its access to, and use of data has also completely transformed, enabling faster pricing and underwriting decisions.

As an AWS-hosted solution, Policy Manager is easily scalable, enabling Pukka to expand capacity on demand as it adds products or partners.

Integration with the Motor Insurance Database (MID) database automates vehicle records updates to reduce potential claims exposure.

With near real-time access to risk data, Pukka is also seeing a significant improvement in its ability to respond to market conditions, using live business insights to inform pricing and underwriting decisions.

"Our MGA business has grown rapidly since we first launched Pukka and it became clear to us that we would need a new platform to meet our growth ambitions, which include adding product lines, schemes and distribution.

"We had significantly outgrown our previous back-office solution, which was necessitating too many workarounds and resource-intensive processes outside the system. As a longstanding CDL partner, we learned that CDL were developing a cloud-based MGA solution and we were really excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with them through this process and influence its design.

"The end result reflects this agile development process, based on storyboarding user needs, and it also benefits from CDL's considerable cloud capabilities; the platform is hosted on Amazon Web Services [AWS], making it incredibly fast, resilient, secure and scalable - all of which are crucial in enabling us to expand with confidence in our infrastructure."

Sam White, founder of the Freedom Group

• Overview
• Strata
• Hummingbird
• Proteus
• Kingfisher
• Vehicle Information Services
• Policy Manager