Axon – Embracing Innovations with a Unified Insurance Platform

Author: Rob van Esch – VP Strategy & Innovation at Keylane

In the world of software, a standard solution is defined as a pre-configured, ready-made product that addresses common industry needs. In the insurance industry, there are a lot of these packaged solutions, primarily developed to support policy management, underwriting and claims processing.

The Difficulties of Legacy Management

Offering swift support to commoditized business processes, a standard software solution made perfect sense in the past. However, many of these systems have been around for decades, and some are now well beyond their ‘best-before-date’.

The full shortcomings of legacy systems become apparent when insurers desire to orchestrate business processes over multiple systems within diverse application landscapes – be it integrations to commercial-off-the-shelf applications, connecting to bespoke point solutions or onboarding external service providers. Lack of extension points and outdated APIs have made it technically challenging and consequently expensive to develop, test and maintain these systems. Adding to this complexity, many insurance systems contain 100+ system integrations, hooking into different levels of the core, which are built with a wide range of technologies and standards.

Future-Fit Flexibility is Essential

In addition to the technical openness of a core insurance platform, insurers need to consider functional flexibility. How easily can workflows be changed, and user dialogs extended within the system? And when these actions are carried out, will there be a risk of disrupting other parts of the business? Does your existing system allow for the quick innovation of insurance products, or will it take more than two years from concept to market launch? Unfortunately, this is not an unrealistic timeline for insurers running legacy systems.

I recently discussed these issues with a product owner at a large insurance provider. He referred to their old system as a ‘Jack of all trades’. On paper, functionality is there, but it can no longer meet todays’ specific business requirements. This has forced the need for workarounds and created long staff onboarding times – again, all contributing to a troubled operation and an escalation of costs. We walked through a list of high priority and innovative initiatives that would have an instant and positive impact on the bottom-line of the business, that sadly the insurer is not able to execute at present due to their legacy systems.

The Evolution of Keylane’s Axon Platform

At Keylane, we designed Axon, our flagship platform for Property & Casualty insurers, with business and technical versatility as fundamental starting points. We want to ensure that insurers can drive business process updates and changes to product definitions themselves, and without the need for IT resources. A modern platform should, for example, enable new insurance products to be quickly created by reusing parts from other products, such as repurposing a no-claim discount from a car insurance into a boat insurance.

Many leading insurance companies were directly involved in shaping the requirements of our Axon platform. And, since many of those organisations were stuck with the shortcomings and challenges described above, future proofing Axon became a vital strategic requirement for all of us at Keylane.

To further support our clients in optimising processes and to drive innovation in customer engagements, we have also introduced No-Code tooling and a purpose driven framework of extension points, using standard protocols for bi-directional exchange of data to other systems. This may include realtime connections and seamless integration of workflows, as well as running batch jobs when so required.

Keylane continues to evolve the technical and functional side of Axon to ensure it remains an accessible launch pad for future innovation within the ever-evolving insurance industry. More recently, we’ve hit several milestones, such as the transformation to a cloud-native code base as well as strengthening the modularisation of Axon core domains. With modern hosting capabilities in place, Keylane offers its clients a delivery agnostic solution, from on-premise to SaaS with multiple cloud options. In summary, making sure that Axon continues to unify all functionality that a modern insurance provider needs, and act as a launch pad for future innovations, remains our core focus.

Keylane’s Axon Platform

With Axon, Keylane fosters trust and empowers lasting partnerships by providing a unified platform that brings core insurance processes, third party services and technology innovations into one central environment. Keylane ensures a 24/7 uptime for its clients and implements continuous upgrades to Axon, guaranteeing that its customers are able to comply with the latest rules and regulations.

A Partnership with Keylane
With a proven track record in successful implementations, our dedicated experts, supported by capable partners, work to deliver an ecosystem of emerging technologies that enables Keylane’s clients to deliver innovative services and products while driving profit, customer growth and true market innovation. Headquartered in Utrecht in the Netherlands, Keylane employs around 700 people and delivers services to over 225 insurance companies across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland.