Legal & General GI delivers home insurance quotes in 90 seconds using APIs

Challenge

Transforming the digital insurance experience

Established in 1836, Legal & General (L&G) is the United Kingdom's largest provider of individual life assurance products and a top 20 global asset manager. Since L&G’s inception, the insurance industry has changed dramatically with increasing pressure to reduce costs and engage customers through digital channels. To remain competitive, L&G’s insurance arm, General Insurance (GI), has a goal to become a market leader in providing digital access to insurance — all while delivering a best-in-class customer and adviser experiences, lowering costs, and increasing sales. 

However, developing digital experiences for customers and advisers requires connectivity between various systems, surfacing claims, policy, billing, and other data in a quick and scalable manner. But behind the scenes, the company’s IT systems were connected via point-to-point integrations, which exacerbated operational inefficiencies and forced teams to reinvent the wheel each time they needed to develop a digital experience or release a new product or service. Failure to integrate and innovate quickly meant falling behind the competition. 

Objectives

Becoming a market leader in digital insurance

L&G GI wanted to transform into a market leader in digital insurance by:

• Making it easy for customers to purchase L&G GI’s products online
• Enabling better partnerships with affinity partners, intermediaries, brokers, and others 
• Lowering costs and increasing operational efficiency 

Solution

Launching a digital insurance platform 

L&G GI needed to embrace a more efficient approach to integration that enables teams to build a seamless experience for customers and partners alike. “We knew GI needed to evolve, adopt new technology and almost reinvent itself, it was clear that APIs are key to driving digital innovation and better efficiency across the business, so we reviewed the market and spoke with many partners,” said Ben Turner, CTO, L&G GI. “We chose MuleSoft for several reasons, Anypoint Platform offers flexibility, enables reuse, and accelerates project delivery by providing teams with prebuilt APIs, connectors, and other assets.”

With MuleSoft, the L&G GI team took an API-led approach to integration in order to automate the entire home insurance quote process. For example, the company released SmartQuote, a mobile-friendly online tool that takes the hassle out of getting a home insurance quote.  SmartQuote pulls in information from circa 400 data points, using APIs — from Experian to WorldPay, by surfacing data using APIs, L&G GI was able to deliver new services to consumers and partners. 

Previously, home insurance advisers and customers had to go through a time-consuming, manual process to get a quote. They had to fill out numerous applications and answer hundreds of difficult questions. With SmartQuote, home insurance advisers and customers get an accurate quote in 90 seconds by answering five easy questions. 

“SmartQuote has allowed us to reimagine how our advisers and customers get a quote for home insurance,” said Turner. “This means no more answering endless questions or spending countless hours filling out paperwork just to get a home insurance quote.”

After releasing SmartQuote, L&G GI witnessed growing partner demand for the service, specifically from affinity partners, intermediaries, brokers, and insurtech companies. The DevOps team then reused assets to quickly create an external set of SmartQuote APIs that offer the service to partners — reducing onboarding and development time.

Results

Releasing products and services 2.5x faster 

By making SmartQuote easily available to partners via APIs, L&G GI has increased sales opportunities by two-fold and attracted more home insurance customers than ever before. “SmartQuote is an example of how we can revolutionize the insurance market with our API strategy,” says Turner. 

L&G GI's ability to integrate multiple big data sources to build SmartQuote garnered the company top honors for innovation at the 2017 Digital and Insurtech Awards. Since then, L&G GI has won multiple awards for other technological innovations, including Insurance Times’ Insurer Innovation of the year. 

Additionally, teams are now able to build products and services 2.5x faster, simply by reusing and adapting the same APIs for new initiatives, such as our SmartQuote Intermediary launch
 “Today, we can deliver solutions a lot faster — all because we are reusing 60-70% of APIs across the organization,” said Turner. 

By increasing the speed of project delivery and reducing manual processes and operational inefficiencies, L&G GI has also cut down on maintenance costs by 15%. "Reusable APIs are driving efficiencies and cost savings across our business,” said Turner.

Looking ahead, L&G GI plans to continue driving innovation by building upon their digital insurance vision. To do so, the team will further develop API capability across its entire product range and drastically simplification of its IT estate.

“We can now use the data and technology available to us to shape the future of the insurance industry and deliver products and services that make the lives of our customers and partners easier and simpler” says Turner.

“The speed of innovation we’re achieving would not have been possible without MuleSoft and our API strategy.”

Ben Turner
CTO, L&G GI