The eAgent system for Warta (part of HDI/Talanx Group)

Overview

Warta, a member of the Talanx Group, is a leading company in the Polish insurance market, offering high-quality P&C and life insurance products. The implementation of the modern eAgent sales platform was a key element of its technology strategy, aimed at empowering and streamlining the work of its network of over 40,000 agents. This solution became the foundation for serving millions of customers and policies, directly contributing to dynamic business growth and solidifying Warta's position as the second-largest player in the Polish market.

Key Challenges

The main challenge was to create a state-of-the-art, user-friendly, and comprehensive platform that would support agents and underwriters in their sales and post-sales processes. The system needed to be exceptionally intuitive and highly automated to meet stringent KPIs for maximum policy issuance time, which is just a few minutes for B2C products. This challenge encompassed all product lines, each requiring agents to input numerous parameters to calculate a premium, which created a risk of errors and prolonged the process.

Solution Approach

In response to these needs, the eAgent platform was implemented—a modern solution for agents consisting of 6 main modules (including Sales, Post-Sales Services, 360° Customer View), designed to automate and streamline daily work.

The system's architecture is based on a hybrid approach, utilizing microservices for key components. This ensures both the stability of the solution and the ability to scale quickly and easily, while also allowing multiple independent development teams to work simultaneously.

The platform's backend engine is Higson, which manages all the business logic, including data validation rules, UI field visibility, risk assessment, premium calculation, and exception handling. A key element of the project was the continuous involvement of UX/UI experts and future end-users (agents), who co-created and evaluated the final tool during the prototyping phase.

Execution and Results

The implementation of the eAgent system began in phases in the second half of 2018. The platform quickly proved its value, delivering tangible results at both the operational and business levels.

Business Results (2022 vs. 2017):

• A 56% increase in gross written premium (GWP) in P&C insurance (from $1.28B to $2.0B).
• A 132% increase in financial results in P&C insurance (from $81M to $190M).

Operational and Technical Results:

• High Performance: The system handles over 600 quotes per minute and issues over 8,000 policies per hour during daily peaks.
• Reliability: There have been zero service availability issues for over 30 consecutive months.
• High User Adoption: The platform proved so intuitive that many of the 40,000 agents skipped reading the user manual.
• Automation: The system makes over 1 million daily requests to external data sources to automatically populate information, relieving agents from manual data entry.

Conclusion

The implementation of the eAgent platform was a key element of Warta's innovation program, driving its growth and allowing it to achieve the position of the second-largest insurer in Poland. Creating a highly automated, scalable, and intuitive tool for a vast sales network proved to be a strategic success. The project demonstrated that a large, established insurance company can successfully compete with innovative InsurTechs by focusing on modern technology and concentrating on the needs of the customer and the agent.