Transforming Product Management at Allianz Poland

Overview

Allianz Poland, a leading global insurer, implemented our proprietary Higson solution as a centralized platform for product logic and sales process management. The client's key strategic objective was to empower business teams with greater control over the product portfolio, aiming to streamline operations and significantly reduce time-to-market.

Key Challenges

Before the implementation, Allianz Poland faced several key operational challenges:

• Effectively managing a broad and continuously expanding portfolio of insurance products.
• The need to unify and simplify sales processes and workflows for customizing products to meet client needs.
• Seamlessly integrating the new solution with numerous existing IT systems within the company's complex infrastructure.

Solution Approach

In response to these challenges, Allianz chose to implement Higson as a central engine for product configuration and decision logic. The platform provided a comprehensive suite of tools to manage the entire product lifecycle, including:

• Sales Process Configuration: Enabled business teams to have full control over user interface attributes, such as field visibility and mandatory inputs, without needing IT involvement.
• Health Questionnaire Designer: Created flexible health questionnaires that could be dynamically integrated into the purchasing process for various products.
• Risk Definitions Repository: Centralized the management of risks and coverages, allowing a single risk definition to be reused across multiple products without the need for re-creation.
• Coverage Customization: Introduced precise rules for sums insured, premium ranges, and the conditional availability of specific options.
• Investment Simulation Algorithm: Provided clients with a tool for running investment scenario simulations (in optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic variants).
• Document Generation Conditions: Defined business rules that automated the creation and modification of policy documents.

Execution and Results

The rollout began with a pilot launch of Higson for a single property insurance product. Following the success of this phase, the platform's use was systematically expanded to most property, life, and group insurance lines. Notably, the system was also made available to external IT vendors working with Allianz, confirming its flexibility.

The benefits achieved directly addressed the initial challenges:

• Reduced Development Cycle: Shifting the management of business logic to the intuitive Higson Studio environment significantly accelerated the delivery of new products and modifications to existing ones.
• Proven Scalability: The platform successfully handled the growing number of products and integrations within the Allianz ecosystem, proving its high performance and scalability.
• Centralized Management: A single, centralized environment was established to serve the internal needs of Allianz as well as its technology partners, with full access control managed through profiles, privileges, and separate workspaces.

Conclusion

The implementation of Higson at Allianz Poland proved to be a strategic success, transforming product management from a fragmented, IT-reliant process into a centralized and agile operating model driven by the business. The project not only addressed key challenges related to scalability and speed-to-market but also established a solid foundation for the company's future growth and insurance product innovation.