HBOS-owned insurer esure has used its recently developed
service oriented architecture (SOA) to speedily bring to market a
new insurance brand aimed at female drivers.
Sheila's Wheels was launched last month after six months of
development carried out by esure and IT consultancy Detica.
The tight timescale of the project - which delivered a
quotations system, integrated call centre and website - was made
possible by the SOA. The architecture was established by esure
earlier this year after nine months of work across a range of
related in-house IT assignments.
Mark Foulsham, IT director at esure, said, "The SOA represents a
fundamental shift in architecture away from highly integrated
systems and towards more componentised and discretely definable
services."
The modular structure meant that when it came to developing the
various systems for Sheila's Wheels, esure was able to work on each
part of the system in turn, without engaging the rest of the
architecture. The company estimates that it halved the number of
hours spent in development by working in this way.
Foulsham said the SOA had also brought substantial business
benefits - most notably by improving the agility of esure's
quotations system, which is built on a BEA Weblogic platform.
The system, which is used not only by Sheila's Wheels but also
to generate quotes for sister divisions esure and First
Alternative, allows the various underwriting teams to provide
insurance quotes based on a complex set of individual and
market-driven variables.
Foulsham said re-architecting the engine into a single web
service allowed underwriters to work with it directly. He said it
was now able to bring up-to-date rates to market 10 times faster
than had been possible using esure's previous infrastructure.
In practice, he said this means the system allows esure to react
quickly enough to any market changes to alter rate sets
overnight.
"That speed-to-market is crucial to maintaining accuracy of
quote," said Foulsham. "We want to differentiate between ourselves
and others in the space by knowing more about our customers in a
more accurate way. If you take a long time to adapt rates you will
lose out."
The core insurance system used by the esure partners is an
Oracle-based technology called The Insurance Application. The
company also uses the Oracle Financials datawarehouse system to
handle its financial business processes.