Life insurance quoting engine: instant quotes, a human only when needed

The challenge

The client, an established UK life insurer, was moving back into the protection market. To sell protection they needed the system that sits behind every quote: the one that takes a customer through a long set of health and lifestyle questions, around 50 to 100 of them, covering things like whether they smoke or have a history of illness, and turns the answers into a price. They had such a system, but it was built on outdated technology and was no longer fit to compete in a modern market.

Our approach

We were brought in to rebuild the quoting journey from the ground up.

1. A modern quote journey. We rebuilt the customer-facing journey so an applicant can work through the health and lifestyle questions online and reach a decision in a single sitting, rather than through a dated and clunky process.
2. An instant decision wherever possible. We connected the journey to the programme's underwriting engine so that, in the common case, the customer gets an automated quote straight away instead of waiting.
3. A clear path for the complex cases. Where an application is too involved to decide automatically, the system hands it cleanly to a human underwriter, so no customer hits a dead end.

Behind all of it, we built the platform to stay reliable and to scale as volumes grow, and delivered it sprint by sprint.

The result

The insurer went back to market with a modern protection quote journey in place of an ageing one. Applicants can work through the questions and get a decision online in a single sitting, and only the cases that genuinely need extra scrutiny are passed to a human underwriter, so the underwriting team spends its time where it adds the most value.