Aligned Business: Keeping Insurance Companies Aligned with Digitization

"Helping insurance companies to win customers is the mantra that drives us forward,” says Susan He, Director of Digital Insurance Products at Aligned Business. Amidst the growing digitization and technological advancements, traditional insurance companies often lag behind due to their reliance on legacy systems and processes. While there is a lot happening on the technology front where technologies such as IoT, Big Data, and Blockchain are being employed on pilot bases in some organizations, insurance firms need to adopt digital platforms. Singapore-based Aligned Business helps the insurers make this transition with a technology platform designed to eliminate the challenges they face while embracing digitization. As a digital insurance innovation enabler, Aligned Business introduces Origami—a technology platform—that helps insurance companies win more customers by embracing new-age technologies.

Flexibility to satisfy digital customers and cost-efficiency to meet P&L targets are Origami’s DNAs, which consist of components such as product features, underwriting rules, rating algorithms, documents, communication methods, user interfaces (UIs), sales processes, and customer experience. The platform is designed for agile product development and distribution and can be used for any insurance product in any country. This makes Origami a global platform suitable for insurers operating across countries through multiple distribution channels.

With Origami, insurers can seize the opportunity to configure the products desired by specific distribution partners, eliminating the need for IT troops to code the entire product.

Origami enables the underwriters to configure the insurance product features, algorithms, and sales profit based on underwriting rules, reducing the work of manual underwriting, sales, and claims processing. Further, it also allows companies to set up their own insurance platform with internal product automation and UI configuration. This eliminates the need for coding each product for distribution enabling companies to deliver what their customers want within one to two weeks with Origami. “With Origami it will now be more cost-effective for the insurance companies to do business in the digital space,” adds Susan.

Origami is built on a strategic configurable framework and dynamic data hierarchy specifically structured to address the pain-points of insurance companies. A financial product distribution company leveraged Origami to configure an insurance product. Before approaching Aligned Business, the client outsourced its work to an IT company but realized that it was “burning a hole in their pocket” and the product coding process was time-consuming. Aligned Business assisted the client and configured the product, facilitated a flexible, cost-efficient API integration within 15 days.

With these agile features, Aligned’s insurance clients can configure individual and SME insurance products such as accident and health, travel, home, and car insurance for instant sales on any digital device. The challenges that Aligned can help insurers address while transitioning to digital sales are not just one product but all products, just one channel but all channels, just for one country but for all countries. For instance, a client used Origami to fulfill a hospital’s protection product sales with multiple APIs deployment which only took less than four weeks. The product configuration including features, rates, underwriting criteria, documentation was done within a day. The rest of the time was spent on multi-system integrations and UAT. This is three times faster than a typical product launch of the same kind and for the subsequent product launch on same integration structure will most likely take half or even less the time invested in the first product launch. This is the economic advantage of using Origami. What is even more exciting is that we deployed the entire launch without physically having to sit in the client’s office. It was an entire ‘in the cloud deployment.’

“Our platform has been created for global operation with mobility in all aspects of the business including supporting tomorrow’s highly mobile workforce,” concludes Susan.