Demystifying Insurtech

A snapshot of how we build scalable software that bridges the gap between traditional insurance and the technological revolution at Lami

By Walid Bouguima, Lead Frontend Engineer.

One can claim with a high level of confidence that insurance is the second most boring thing that you can do manually after reading the French newspaper, Le Monde Diplomatique. Traditional insurance companies are often overwhelmed with the number of documents they have to process to cover or refund customers who face the inescapable pain of the process of insuring their health, family, property, or goods.

We are building an end-to-end solution to deliver better insurance penetration in Africa. Our vision is to remap the insurance journey and offer products that fit the needs of contemporary consumers, delivered through a flexible, robust platform and abstract the industry’s inherent complexity away from our business partners and their customers.

We have more than 150+ API endpoints covering the entire insurance ecosystem, allowing partners to define their customer’s experience on websites and mobile apps. Our full-stack insurance infrastructure comprises two automation layers: an integral API that supports embedded and non-embedded insurance scenarios plus monitoring, a multi-tenancy tool (dashboard) that scales to contain multiple verticals, including advanced analytics, a logging system, and a sales portal.

Today the platform allows the creation of flexible insurance products (15 product types, 75 product categories, 14 asset types, and 18 underwriters) supported by a sophisticated pricing engine. These products can go live in a matter of minutes once the underwriting specifications are defined. It also monitors payment detail, quote processes, claims filing, product updates, and end customer information. Underwriter declaration reports are also automated and can be easily exported, a process that generally takes days.

The platform is powered by the same cutting edge technology used by Google and Microsoft. The front-end is built with Angular and Typescript using a native-modular architecture that is easy to scale towards an advanced, micro-frontend solution on top of Nx. The backend uses ExpressJs on top of NodeJs, which allows for fast and effective API delivery. This is running on a secure, scalable, and highly automated AWS solution.

After considerable research, all these tools have been chosen to build a tech stack that can handle what we aspire to deliver.

There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve our long and short term goals, but we are not building our products in a vacuum; we are addressing a defined problem which requires our engineering team to have a good grasp of core insurance concepts and customer needs, working together with our business teams–many of the insurance experts–towards an optimal product solution.

Follow us on Twitter @LamiInsurtech and join the discussion on the Lami World Blog.