Allianz uses Higson

This leading global insurer started using Higson for a single property product, later expanding it to most of its property, life and group products in Poland.

Success
Story

Higson is also used by several other IT companies that work with Allianz within its infrastructure.

Use cases

Sales process configurator

Higson users may modify attributes of frontend sales process components, such as whether a field is displayed for a particular product, and whether or not input is mandatory.

Health questionnaire designer

Some life insurance products require clients to fill in a health questionnaire. Because the questions and answers are defined in Higson, they can be modified easily: reordering them and changing labels, but also editing the algorithm and deciding premium increases or reductions, or the rules and amounts of loading.

Insurance coverage customization

One risk might be reused in many products, but with different attributes, for instance the sum insured or premium ranges or conditional availability with additional requirements for clients (such as age, cross-sell).

Investment simulation algorithm

Products that include investment funds provide clients with simulations based on several factors, e.g. optimistic, realistic or pessimistic scenario. The algorithm is maintained in Higson.

Document printouts conditions

Generated and printed policies and offers are subject to business rules determining whether to include or exclude parts of a document, or change the contents.

Document printouts conditions

Generated and printed policies and offers are subject to business rules determining whether to include or exclude parts of a document, or change the contents.

Benefits

Faster development cycle

In Allianz, Higson is used primarily by developers, who have accelerated their development and implementation cycles by keeping configuration and business logic in parameters.

One Higson, many systems

A single Higson instance is used by Allianz (the license owner) and by several IT vendors, thanks to the organization of workspaces in the profiles and privileges settings. That means Higson is integrated with not one but many Allianz IT systems.

The challenge

The bank offers change frequently and usually with short notice. NOTUS has to respond rapidly to update quotes, terms, and even the sales process.

The Solution

The client recognized the need for a rules engine early on. NOTUS narrowed the choice to three systems:

When you include SLA, Drools become even more expensive than Higson. We believe that SLA is an essential factor for a financial institution with lots of customers.

Camunda requires to model processes using BPMN. In the NOTUS case, the process is constant. The configuration, on the other hand, changes frequently. Software developers are responsible for such modifications in Camunda.

This approach is expensive and time-consuming. Higson empowers business users to control the configuration. NOTUS valued this feature highly. Higson feature also appreciated by NOTUS is pricing.

The Development

NOTUS implemented Higson as a part of its new sales system for brokers.The developers praised Higson for its capacity to speed up the whole process.

The first public release of the software took place after six months. During the next three months, the team focused on responding to the users’ feedback.

Higson helped to deliver
a system that:

is manageable by the business users

offers an enormous range of configuration

create new mortgage products

cross-sell conditions

insurance pricing

marketing descriptions

required documents

provides API for banks

integrates with the client’s CRM

empowers users to compare different offers

speeds up form fulfilling (one form for all banks)

validates applications automatically

creates a payment schedule for a customer

allows sending required documents online in GPDR compliant way

The new system enabled to shorten the time
spent on a customer significantly.

When to use Higson as a BRMS

Higson enables developers to externalize complex business logic. This logic (for example pricing or scoring rules) can be modified by developers or business experts in the Higson Studio UI.

Each modification is immediately reflected in any application that uses Higson Runtime library, so we can say users may modify logic on the fly.

That makes Higson the best fit for the kind of rules-heavy projects found often in the finance or insurance industries.

Higson helped to deliver a system that:

Higson helped to deliver
a system that: