AXA Luxembourg connects systems for a single customer view

Challenge

Held back by custom-coded integrations

AXA Luxembourg, along with AXA Wealth Europe, is part of the AXA Group — which encompasses over 171,000 employees that serve 105M customers in 61 countries.

To become the #1 preferred insurance company, AXA Luxembourg needed to embrace digital to move faster as a business, outshine the competition, and better serve their policyholders.

None of these goals were easy, as the company needed to better leverage their data — which required connecting different homemade systems on-premises and external systems in the cloud. With custom coded integrations, it was costly and slow to connect systems, apps, and data.

Objectives

Improving the policyholder experience and increasing employee productivity

For AXA Luxembourg, moving faster as a business required:

• Reducing operational costs and eliminating manual labor by automating key business processes, such as claims management
• Creating a single customer view of policyholders to resolve their queries faster — improving the customer experience and employee productivity
• Building an architectural foundation that enables the team to launch future customer innovations more quickly through reuse

Solution

Moving from custom-code to reusable APIs and integrations

To start, AXA Luxembourg partnered with Cap4 Lab to identify an integration and API platform that would allow them to move beyond custom-coded integrations.

The AXA Luxembourg team turned to MuleSoft. “We chose Anypoint Platform due to its built-in security and the fact that Mule 4’s templates and examples enable us to develop more quickly,” said Jonathan Warnand, CRM, Integration & Release Manager, AXA Luxembourg.

“Mule 4 made our developers' lives easier — the improved error handling capabilities make troubleshooting issues a breeze," said Warnand.

AXA Luxembourg embedded integration and API best practices into their foundation by creating a Center of Enablement (C4E) — a cross-functional team charged with enabling teams to move beyond custom-coded integrations and adopt an API-led approach to integration.

Automating the claims management process

For their first project, the AXA team wanted to automate business processes by streamlining claims management. This required connecting an internal contract management system and claims management system to an external claims management system. Previously, team members manually entered information into each system — a cumbersome and error-prone process.

Armed with a C4E, MuleSoft Training resources, and Cap4 Lab’s hands-on peer programming model, the AXA Luxembourg team became Anypoint Platform experts in just 6 months.

"Getting started with a new technology platform is always a journey, but we never could have imagined it would be this easy with Anypoint Platform. We were concerned it may take a while for our .NET developers team to get up to speed, but MuleSoft's prebuilt APIs and connectors made it so easy.”

The team developed six APIs that connected data across multiple systems, including the Document Management API, Insurance Backend API, and Customer API. They built the API-led integrations in just 12 weeks, compared to the 18 weeks it would have taken with a custom code approach.

Previously, AXA Luxembourg had to start from scratch each time the business required new functionality, services or products. Today, thanks to the new integrations, all data is available via APIs and available in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and employees only have to enter information in one system, as opposed to four.

“We are astounded by the development speed and automation we have achieved. Teams no longer have to do duplicative, manual work and our internal processes are now much faster than ever before — leaving more time for innovation,” said Olivier Vansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg.

Building a single view of their customers

For AXA Luxembourg, developing a single customer view was critical to enhancing the customer experience and enabling employees to resolve customer inquiries faster while personalizing interactions.

That’s why their entire team rallied behind launching a Customer 360 project using the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform.

Thanks to MuleSoft’s prebuilt Salesforce connectors — such as the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Connectors, the AXA Luxembourg team was able to connect all systems in just one year.

“It was not only a technological transformation, it was also a human and process transformation because it allowed us to truly change the way we operate our business. Thanks to MuleSoft’s library of reusable APIs and integrations, we now prioritize reuse — as opposed to building from scratch using custom code,” said Olivier Vansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg.

The reusable foundation AXA Luxembourg built continues to help the team deliver new customer innovations and meet critical digital initiatives.

Results

Delivering projects 3X faster

With MuleSoft and Salesforce, AXA Luxembourg improved the end-to-end customer experience and made it easier for employees to productively serve customers.

By moving beyond custom-coded integrations and embracing API-led integration, the team can now deliver integrations 30% faster than before. This means that teams spend 25% less time doing manual work and, as a result, can dedicate more time to innovation.

The team’s focus on building reusable integrations means that now 60% of APIs are reused for future projects. And, for some projects, that number is even higher.

“Now when we build something, we know it can be reused for other projects, which means we not only speed up development, but we are spending more time building innovative solutions for our customers,” said Warnand.