Insurance NPD following Legacy System Upgrade

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Insurance NPD following Legacy System Upgrade

Customer location

Project duration:

1 year (ongoing)

Our client is a US-based insurance leader providing top-class insurance services for small and medium businesses. The client has started a major legacy system overhaul with a previous vendor, but switched to Symfa when they saw us in action during a couple of test projects.

The client opted for a new insurance product – cyber liability insurance – meeting the ever-changing needs of time. The new product is designed to cover a vast amount of potential loss events, such as stolen credit card data, phone numbers and names, driver's license numbers, health records, etc. The software behind the product will be the extension of the existing in-house system. The agent/underwriter logs into his/her account in the system and performs all the actions needed to provide the service: creates or amends the quote/policy, sends it for approval or cancels it.

To calculate the accurate amount of premiums in case the loss event occurs, the client needed us to develop a cyber liability rating engine. Besides adding the new functionality, the major business goal of the project was to rewrite the legacy code, make it more safe and up-to-date.

As it happens on the big projects going back years, a lot of documentation is no longer relevant. Our team did a great job getting acquainted with the system through the available docs and by studying the code. In case none of this helped, the Symfa engineers weren’t too shy as to timely consult the BA on the customer side in order to eliminate any guesswork from the task delivery.

In time the onboarding meetings for newbies were added to streamline the knowledge sharing process, during which the long-term team players introduce the younger colleagues into the project and fill the gaps into their domain or system knowledge.

Solution

First thing first, in order to implement the new engine, the team had to have the legacy system ready. The legacy software containing dozens of thousands lines of code, was to be rewritten in a simpler and modern-looking format. After the code improvements, the new functionality was introduced.

Under the project, the team created a lot of APIs to implement the API connectivity principle in the client’s legacy system. This unleashed the legacy functionality without harcdcore system remodeling, which could result in an unpredictable damage to the legacy software. The API’s would allow referring to the legacy code and calculating the accurate amount of the premiums.

Work done

The Symfa team have been engaged in

code improvements
API development in C#
Frontend development with Angular.

In the beginning, the Symfa team was hired to carry out only the backend jobs, while the web team of the customer was in charge of the frontend part. During the trial period the Symfa guys showed them at their best and gained the customer’s trust. Thus, the fronted development in Angular was handed over to us, too.

Soon after the project initiation, the delivery processes were streamlined during the high quality onboarding phase (3 weeks). Any and all project issues are effectively tackled during the daily sync-ups with the client team and internal daily stand-ups (solely for the Symfa members).

Since the project started the team was able to rewrite a huge part of the legacy code with tons of APIs written to regenerate the platform. The distributed team started with the functionality to enable the client to cover indemnification for legal fees and expenses, provide customer notifications in the event of a breach and now is moving by leaps and bounds with other features. The project that has stretched for more than a year by now also empowers the client to cover Website Media Content Liability, Regulatory Defense and Penalties as well as PCI Fines, Expenses and Costs and more.