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A flexible and scalable rules engine for dynamic pricing

A flexible and scalable rules engine for dynamic pricing

With over 300,000 customers and 1000's of brokers, Fidelity Life, three-time New Zealand life insurance company of the year, needed an intelligent rules engine to support fast, dynamic pricing that would give them control and the flexibility to scale.

Automated Process Flow

Business Transformation / Intelligent rules engine / Insurance

Approach

New Zealand has one of the lowest rates of life insurance in the developed world. It has been Fidelity Life's vision since 1973 to help lift financial awareness so more New Zealanders can get the benefits of insurance protection and improve their wellbeing.

In order to meet the evolving needs of their customer base, combined with their goal to deliver long term sustainable growth, Fidelity Life embarked on an ambitious transformation strategy which aims to reimagine the life insurance model for New Zealanders.

Essential to the strategy’s success is a bold technology transformation project to modernise and digitise their entire value chain.

As is often the case in the insurance industry, Fidelity Life's business rules were coded and spread over a number of legacy systems, making it difficult to maintain and change them. This also created a significant barrier to grow and maintain a versatile product suite.

Working closely with the Executive and project teams, Digital Experience Labs helped shape a future state landscape that included an intelligent, no-code rules engine that supported a modern, distributed architecture.

The rules engine needed to:

  • Allow business analysts to author and maintain business rules in a no-code, human-readable format
  • Have the flexibly to add or change products with ease
  • Validate and process complex, dynamic pricing requests in real-time
  • Integrate seamlessly within a distributed, micro-services, Microsoft Dynamics365 and Azure architecture.

With a strong understanding of the target architecture, expertise in rules engines and service orchestration combined with a solid background in the life insurance domain, Digital Experience Labs took on the role as a trusted advisor and solution provider for the Fidelity Life team.

FidelityDiagram2

Methodology

Our journey with Fidelity Life began with a simple, yet comprehensive proof of concept (POC). By asking the right questions with the right depth early in the process, we were able to emulate an end-to-end pricing solution in a matter of days that helped Fidelity Life visualise and appreciate our understanding of their needs as well as a working example of what modern insurance pricing solution could look like.

Our POC was built on, Decisions - an innovative no-code rules engine that allows business rules to be visually designed, making them quick to author and easy to change. The POC was also designed to illustrate how Decisions could provide platform-based microservices with their distributed architecture, providing intelligent product validation and pricing as an API.

Building on our initial development we continued working in parallel with Fidelity Life's agile, multi-vendor project team to shape and develop the target solution.

Supporting a detailed analysis of pricing and technical requirements, guiding test strategies and identifying key risks throughout the journey, we sought to give the Fidelity Life team visibility, control and ownership of direction and the end solution.

“Digital Experience Labs has been a close and valued partner on Fidelity Life’s transformation journey since the very early days. Their ability to solve massively complex problems with cutting edge technology has been an invaluable part of getting us to a successful delivery. They’ve taken the time to understand our business in detail and, coupled with their technology expertise, this makes them a formidable force.”

Dan Wilkinson, CTO

Outcomes

Whilst their transformation is an ongoing journey, the Fidelity Life team has made significant progress in modernising and digitising its systems for the benefit of their customers and their people.

Now, with the increasing role of Decisions as a rule-driven microservice platform, Fidelity Life's new insurance platform architecture has:

  • Created a solid foundation for scale and agility, giving them the ability to rapidly and painlessly add and modify products
  • Given their actuarial team the freedom to implement intelligent, best-of-breed pricing methods
  • Unlock their intellectual property - with key business rules and decisioning logic visually preserved, centralised and ready for reuse

Spending time with the Fidelity Life team up-front to understand their business challenges, drivers and people, Digital Experience Labs was able to play a pivotal role in guiding and realising their vision to transform their underlying systems to deliver valued and flexible products for their employees, financial advisors and valued customers.

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Luis Nejo

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