TUW uses Higson

TUW is one of Poland’s leading mutual insurance companies. The insurer implemented Higson to help develop a new motor insurance pricing model that allows for efficient tariff management in response to changing market conditions.

Success
Story

Use cases

Business Rules Engine

Insurance products and related selling processes contain enormous amounts of business logic, including, for example, complex underwriting rules. Higson is a powerful tool that manages these business rules and optimizes processes. The tool allows non-technical subject matter experts to make changes almost on a daily basis.

Pricing Configurator

Motor insurance tariffs are generated using sophisticated pricing models. The tariff structure includes many aggregated data and actuarial functions. Tariffs can change from day to day, based on new circumstances. Higson allows for changes to be made on the fly when the actuarial model is updated or the pricing strategy is changed.

Data Dictionary Repository

Reference data (e.g. postal codes, countries), product dictionary data, list of terms and conditions, etc. are also kept in one place and reused in the sales system.

Frontend Configurator/Validator

Various frontend elements attributes are parametrized, configured, and validated in Higson. Therefore, the business user may modify them without any assistance from the IT department.

Benefits

Efficiency in a Complex Architecture

Higson keeps track of thousands of parameters used in sales systems, with no perceived lags. As a result, preparing thousands of offers with various scopes is no longer a problem.

Parameters Can Be Updated Without Using New Software Versions

Modifications to parameters and changes in the pricing data don’t require the release of new software versions. Some changes even go unnoticed by the systems communicating with Higson.

Flexible and Quick Configuration

Defining the product and the logic governing it and placing it in an appropriate structure, allows users to have full control over the applied rules and easy current recognition of where to make changes in order to achieve their business goals. This distinguishes Higson from, for example, the Drools engine.

Versioning

Higson makes it is possible to use more than one tariff at the same time, allowing users to freely experiment and make necessary improvements. This provides a wide range of business opportunities, for example, customer segmentation that leads to the optimization of the written premium. Testing each subsequent version of the tariff can be done without IT involvement, which significantly speeds up the work in early stages.

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: