Months in minutes. Faster insurance product configuration

Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał – Business Development Manager, Higson, Decerto

For most insurers, even a small change to pricing or underwriting rules means joining an IT release queue — often with a wait of months before it ever reaches production. By the time the change ships, competitors have already moved, and the business team that asked for it has lost momentum.

In this session, Decerto walked through why that bottleneck exists and how it can be removed. Łukasz Niedośpiał, Business Development Manager for Higson, gave a live demonstration of how a business rules engine lets product, pricing, and underwriting changes be made directly by business teams — safely, with full audit history, and without waiting on a development cycle.

Watch the recording to discover:

• Why time to market stalls – how business logic gets buried in IT code and what that costs in missed opportunities
• Inside Higson – a live walkthrough of changing pricing, coverages, and decision tables without writing code
• Governance and control built in – full change history, version rollback, and granular access by team or product
• Versioning for the real world – cloning and scheduling product versions for seasonal offers and future launches
• AI-assisted decisioning – how an AI model can be connected directly into a decision table for risk assessment
• Live Q&A – training time, deployment model, security, and access control, answered directly

Missed the live session? Watch the recording or read the full transcript below.

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[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Hello and welcome to our session today, Months in Minutes: Faster Insurance Product Configuration. My name is Jim Erickson and I will be moderating this conversation today. I am a market research analyst and I work across several domains related to insurance very often, and talk about some of the concepts that we're going to share today, and I'm really looking forward to this discussion. I'm sure a lot of the folks out there are familiar with some policy management solutions they have in their organizations — maybe less so with some of the product management or the product configurators, which have more capabilities, more attuned to more systems, and can lay on top of some of the limited tools that connect to core systems and repositories and so forth. So I don't think it's going to be a very technical conversation today, because we're really talking about business outcomes. I recently had the opportunity to meet with Decerto — I'm not affiliated with them, but I've enjoyed meeting with our speaker today, Łukasz, who is the Business Development Manager for their Higson product, which is what we're going to be talking about today, along with some of the use cases and the opportunities presented in terms of how business teams working together can cut business release time, cycles, time to market, things like that. So I'm looking forward to that education today.

I want to remind everybody that we're recording this session — we'll release a recording of this as soon as we have it available to you. I have my notepad handy here, and I suggest you use the opportunity also to take some notes and have some questions for our speaker today. Anything we don't get to during the session, we'll be happy to follow up with you and share some other information — whatever you need, feel free to get in touch.

Okay, so with that, I'm going to hand things off to our speaker. I'm going to call you Łukasz today — I'll let you give us your last name so I don't mess it up terribly, although I do feel pretty good about that. I'll let you introduce yourself, and as we spoke before, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're here to talk about today.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, thank you, Jim, for the introduction, and thank you for not misspelling my surname. I'm from Poland, generally speaking, and that's a difficult kind of language. My name is Łukasz Niedośpiał — it's spelled differently, in a different order, as you can see. And I'm from the company Decerto. That's basically a software house here in Poland that has dedicated 20 years to cooperation with the insurance industry in general.

What I'll be speaking about today, to be honest, isn't really a conversational topic — it's more like sharing a story of what we faced in cooperation with the companies, the customers that we cooperated with, and this might find some resonance with you — something you may feel familiar with. That would be the story of slow time to market in some situations, which could be mended by some changes.

So let me start by sharing this familiar story. Imagine the situation that your peers gave you a task. This task is very simple: you need to make your product profitable again. As usual in that kind of situation, your board expects results, and when you look all around the market, you see your competition releasing new features, regulators setting new rules, and of course your customers expect personalized offers, and they want those changes now, not in six months. Sometimes you're the leader who knows what to do — that's why you were handed that kind of task. Your team is the best on the market, you know what you're doing. It's usually some small stuff, like a change in pricing, maybe some small discount, or underwriting rules. But when you're ready — and your team usually is — you have to go to the IT department, and when you go there and say, “Okay, we have this plan, we need to push it to production as soon as possible,” then those situations happen where they open the release calendar and say, “Okay, let me see... we're busy over here, the first release window we can offer will be like six months — take it or leave it.” And that's the dread of most product managers — you're ready to run, but as we speak, your shoes are nailed to the floor. What's the real reason behind this? You'll know in a few seconds.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Great, so if you could all just quickly select one of the answers here, so we can get a feel for where everybody is in their own workflow to enact changes in products — hours or days, one to two months, three to six months, more than six months. Łukasz, I loved your example of shoes nailed to the floor — I think that paints a good picture for me. I'm familiar with working with insurance organizations, and a lot of legacy infrastructure — I think people accept this as just the way it is. Okay, so if everybody has answered and selected that input and submitted it, we'll go ahead and share the answers. Łukasz, if you want to go ahead and advance, we'll show folks what they said.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

So basically, before I go further with my presentation, I'd like to show what we faced during that kind of question with the partners we cooperate with. The answer varies, to be honest, and I expect the answers in this poll will also vary in some way, because there are different kinds of changes. When we face small changes, it usually takes — small to medium changes usually take like a quarter of a year, but the bigger ones take six months, and the most concrete, the biggest one — when you shift, let's say, your entire sales application or something like that — could take even more.

The real reason behind it is that we've buried all of the essential business logic — pricing, underwriting, commissions — deep in the IT code. What does that mean? It means that any kind of modification, any kind of change, requires new development, testing, deployment, regression tests, and basically it takes weeks if not months. The problem isn't the technology itself — it's the way we've tied our business and IT so tightly together that right now it's difficult not to be co-dependent on each other. Every single, even small, nuanced modification means missed opportunities or slow time to market. When your competitors are faster than you, you're frustrated, your business teams are frustrated, the board isn't happy at all with that kind of situation. All of the innovation is buried under the weight of these release schedules, and that's not a nice situation for the product teams.

What if we asked the question: what if we could change our pricing, our underwriting, our promotions — all those small things — without waiting for this release window? Or what if your business team could make those changes safely, instantly, with full compliance and governance built into the solution? That was our question. When we wanted to answer this question, we found one of the ways to avoid this kind of painful cycle of dependency.

For that purpose, I'll need to change my screen for a second — I want to show you our insurance product configurator called Higson. Let me give it just a second, I'll share my screen with you, and that's the screen. Okay, tell me if you can see my screen right now. Jim, do we have you there? Can you see my screen, Jim?

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Yes, I see you. I'm sorry, I was a little frozen out there for a minute. I'm with you, I'm with you — we had a little freeze. I was worried that we lost you for a second.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, so let me proceed with the presentation. What I'll show you over here is, to be honest, two things, but we'll focus on just one. This thing you see right now is a typical sales application, similar to how some people work. So basically, what you have here are examples of what you can sell, and what I'll use to show you how flexible you can be with modifications is this product configurator called Higson. I'll allow myself to log in here and connect it to my demo. So in the usual situation, when we want to prepare in advance, for example for some renewal of the offering, or we'd like to personalize some kind of offering for the customer, we need to go, as the salesperson, to a certain customer and — allow me to just find and open some layers of it. I need to fill in some data. Jim, if you want to ask me any questions, feel free, I'll answer them immediately.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Sure, I'll be keeping tabs here. This is very “rubber meets the road” — this is the part I'm interested in very much, for all the reasons you talked about, Łukasz. You know, if we can disintermediate some of those revisions and testing and modeling and delays that...

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Yeah — that's the whole agenda I want to show you. So basically, the product configurator is not only the place where you can do modifications and so on. This particular one, Higson, could also be a repository of data, which will be a nice example right now. For instance, I don't recall all of the specific data of the cars that we have stored in our system — this would be unthinkable to do manually. So in this particular case, I need vehicle data here — I need a particular VIN number to make the connection of the vehicle for the customer. So what I'll do is go directly to the repository data in Higson, and I'll pick a BMW to fill the data inside the sales application, just to follow the steps. Basically, when we connect all of this information, it'll be pulled from this product configurator directly into the sales application. So basically, you don't have to remember what is where, in which Excel file or something like that — this is a huge help. Let me just fill in some data to make our example more relatable — maybe I'll just pick some random details. So our Mr. Michael will be like a real, relatable person. Okay, so we now have our scope of insurance, our product ready to prepare for our customer, and what we can see, we have some options for this product here in the sales application, and basically it's set as a strict value here, and we'd like to do some modification, because we want to personalize it for this particular customer. So all of the personalization, all of the content changes, are happening inside Higson, inside the product configurator.

Let me now, for a second, just have you remember this screen — I'll go back and forth, but it's important for you to have the idea of the sales application. Why? Because we believe that if the initial deployment of this product configurator is done properly, it's easier to learn the use of the new tool when it resembles something we already know. So basically, what I mean is, we usually put in the business domain configurator this “mirror structure” of the business application. So basically, it'll contain the same things that we face inside the business applications — like options and coverages, the list of coverages — these are the names that are familiar to us. Let me go back here — so we have those options, we have a bronze option, silver option, gold option, and we have a list of coverages on the left side. This is a very simple example.

Now imagine, just for a moment, that I'd like to change this particular premium for something else, something completely different. The usual way, even with this small task, would be sending a ticket to IT and waiting for the change, and that usually takes time. With Higson, it's not that way — basically, what you'll be able to do is modify it on your own, thanks to this “mirror logic.” If you want to change the medical premium in coverage, you'll find “medical payments” in the list of coverages, and you'll find, in the list of attributes, the name of the thing you want to change — in our case, it's premium. So basically, to do that kind of modification, I just need to click on the active link here, which will take me, as a flow, to another place. What I've opened right now by clicking is actually a new feature that we've added based on our business user research. This flowchart shows us the whole flow of the logic here, and you already saw the first part — the validation of inputs, when I put in the VIN number that pulled all the necessary information into the business application. But right now, I'm concerned about the calculation of the premium. So what I'll do is open the specific element for this — it's called a decision table. This is a super simple scenario — we have a list of input information, which is coming from our business application, like the coverages, the genders, the limits that are there, and our task was very simple: change the premium in a particular coverage. I'll narrow things down — I know that I want to change the 55 here, because right now it's just 155 — it's a very simple example. The editing works like that, Jim — imagine I hit “edit,” and I make the change, just like that, with the save button. I've made my change, and it's almost done.

Almost done, because it's usually not just one change — it's more of them. In Higson, we work in sessions. So basically, when we're done with our task, with the changes — maybe not just one coverage, maybe a few more — when we're ready, we can publish those changes, and this publication goes to the business application. Usually, here, we give some notes for future audits or rollbacks, so I'll call it... sorry, “webinar change,” if you don't mind. So with that simple trick, what I've done — as you can see — is changed the value of the premium, and that was just four clicks. So as you can see, it could be even faster.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Okay, let me stop you here for a moment and ask a couple of questions. Before we were so rudely interrupted, I was already formulating a couple of things. First of all, I didn't see any code being written here — this is a user interface dashboard. Who — what kind of person might see this tool interface, at which level — sales, sales managers, or underwriters?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Sure. So basically, with our tool, we divide the users, let's say, in two ways. We have business users, who are like product managers — the team handling concrete products, with the changes. Sometimes underwriters have their own profiles, for example for underwriting rules, or they're kept somewhere separately. Also, this tool is used by the IT departments, because it speeds up their process — this tool is connected directly, for example, with the legacy systems via APIs, and they don't have to do any kind of, let's say, rerouting of the actual existing code — they just make the modification in this particular place, which is easier.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Well, people on this end hear “low code,” they hear “no code” — sometimes low code is code, and it's interesting to me that you mention it as a user too, because I think they face some of the same bottlenecks as everybody else, and the same backups of work orders and things like that. So I guess you could actually share the results in this, and again, you're operating against the same core systems. Certainly, one of the things that jumps out immediately is, obviously, in a very regulated industry — how is this product overlaid, and how is it delivered? Is this something proprietary, or is it hosted, or subscription-based?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

These are great questions, and I mentioned it at the beginning of our presentation — we've been connected with the insurance market for 20 years now, and we learned, at the beginning, the hard way. So basically, sometimes we thought, “okay, maybe it'll be better if we do all the heavy lifting” — it wasn't a good approach. The best approach, which took some burden off our shoulders, was to deploy that kind of solution on the customer's infrastructure, without access from outside, for outsiders. Basically, what that gives you is security — I know that your companies invest tremendous amounts of money in cybersecurity, because for cybersecurity threats it's a must-have right now, and when you put that kind of solution behind those “steel doors,” so to speak, it's as safe as the data that you operate on, on your own data structure. So basically, it's super safe, and it's a captive system.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

It would be treated with IT, because I could see a lot of managers go, “oh, I can't believe this — I've been using a product management solution and I could do a couple of things, but there's a lot I can't do,” obviously, which is the reason we're here. And we're talking about not having to backfill from IT and get all those backlogs and delays in time to market, and the lack of success because of customer churn rates — the business considerations. So, you know, as much as I know a sales manager loves seeing a product like this, they're also going to hear from legal, they're going to hear from governance, they're going to hear from compliance, like, “whoa, pull your horses.” So I think it's very important to establish those requirements — and of course all the insurance markets have different regulations and different requirements too. So can this address that alongside the same governance and compliance models and controls that they have internally, because it's working strictly against internal systems — is that what you're telling me?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Exactly. And that kind of system... sorry, sometimes I have loose chains of thought, especially if someone asks me an interesting question. So basically, that kind of solution is, I'd say, made for federal governance, where you have different requirements — for example, from different states, you have different laws, different requirements, different situations. We've heard that, for example, in some states you cannot use a particular approach, in others you have to do things completely differently. With this simple tool, you can, let's say, delegate that work to automation of the process, and you can change it instantly. And what's more — and that's also connected with the legal, governance, and compliance question — basically, when we make any kind of modification in this tool, it's tracked. Any kind of modification is tracked, and you can easily access the history behind all of the changes that you've prepared. For example, I just changed this “55” here a few minutes ago, and if I go to “show history” here, I'll have the list of all the changes that were made in this particular decision table. What's more, I'll have the author of the change, the date of the change, and the possibility to see how those things looked in the past, in previous snapshots, with the ability to quickly restore the previous version if something went wrong. So basically, we're keeping our hand on the pulse of the system — if something didn't work as we wanted it to, we can restore the previous version quickly.

And that's not all, to be honest. When we're making modifications, when we're delegating those — right now, for example, to the IT department — I mentioned that there's a whole cycle of creation, the development, which you can do yourself, because you know your business better than the IT guys, since the IT guys need you to explain every single step of what you're doing. So this development cuts the process, because you know what you're actually doing. But then the IT guys can ask, “okay, but what about tests, because you need to test if everything is working correctly, and nothing is broken along the way.” So we figured that thing is super essential for everyone — not only IT people, but also for the business, from the business perspective — because if I'm creating, let's say, some new product from scratch, I don't necessarily get everything correct and right at once. I have some division in my head, and I can set these puzzles here step by step. Then I can move on to something we've added here — it's the “tester” and “batch tester.” With the tester here, we can test any kind of decision table logic that we've put in, and see if this logic is what we expected. For example, here I'm testing this medical coverage premium for different values — if I hit “run test” here, it'll automatically mark it — if it's okay, green; if it's not okay, red. For example, I recall this limit that we made a modification to in this particular place — we expected another value, we changed it to 43, and as you can see, it's marked red — something went wrong. So I can go back and see what went wrong in that logic, and amend it immediately. So that's also a beneficial tool here.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Yeah, I can see a couple of interesting points here. One is that, as you sort of alluded to a minute ago, you don't want it to be telling the business how to run the business, right? They don't want that — you don't know how many times I've actually told people that, because they go and say, “how do I manage my sales?” Of course you don't want it doing that. And the fact that you have this testing and this IT view tells me, in a way, what you want — you don't want an interface that just dumbs down some functionality for some agent, but doesn't really have a holistic kind of view. I like that — I think a product like this should have these sort of tabular, row-and-column views that people are familiar with, and again, not just a dumb interface for an end user, which I think, in some ways, the agent might want — but if you have the depth and the product behind it, I think that's something you'd like to see, both for testing and modeling as well as for just end use, right?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Yeah, and funny you mention you want to see something familiar — that's true, that's the honest truth of everything. We don't like change, we're used to our old way of working, and everyone is — and if someone says it doesn't bother them to have a new tool to use, that's probably unrealistic in that aspect, let's say, because everyone loves their old tools, like, for example, Excel files — everyone uses them, and they're super useful, and we acknowledge this. I've gone back to our decision table here to show you one more thing — basically, this one is a very simple example, we have just 16 rows of information here, of input and output information, but I've seen decision tables with over 90,000 rows, and a lot of columns, which tells you it's a lot of data — and yes, you can, with ease, narrow things down, navigate, edit, from this panel in Higson — but we also give you the possibility to use your Excel files. So basically, you can download all of the decision tables, all of the logic that you've put inside Higson, to an Excel file. And for example, if you have — let's say I won't say in the thousands, but if you have like a few hundred lines of information here, and let's stick with this particular logic — if you want to do a mass change of outcomes, and you prepared it somewhere, on the side, in an Excel file, because you love your Excel — why not? You can just copy and paste a new version of it. For example, let me do this — I've prepared some changes here, I have different values here, and I can substitute them in a matter of seconds.

But I want to show you something very specific to the insurance world. I'll use this example to show you how beneficial that kind of tool could be. So I've just made small modifications, but small modifications are, you know, the remedy for now — now we want to do those now. But when we're working on products, we're usually not working on a day-to-day basis — we're working on, let's say, new promotions for winter, for autumn, for spring, because it has periods. So it's a process that needs to be thought through. This tool was created with insurance companies in mind, and we've added a feature here called “versioning.” With this versioning, for example, in the “region” sector, we have a list of products that exist. When I open this “motor” product here, it'll list all existing versions of this particular product, which I can go back to — for example, if I have customers who have an old version of the product, I can access it via an API call — but that's not the case here. If we want to prepare for the future, and we want a new version of this existing product, it's a very simple thing to do with Higson — we just duplicate the existing one by clicking these squares here. We're cloning the version — we now have version number three, and we can give it a new name. Let's call it “winter version.” And we can schedule the activation of this new version of the product — let's put it on the 1st of December, it should be winter by then. So what I've created right now is a clone of the existing version, in which I can work — I can switch to version three and prepare for the future. So as I already told you, I prepared this particular version of the product...

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

I'll let you wrap this up, and then I want to get to some Q&A for Łukasz, because we have a few questions coming in — and you'll also have a link to get hold of Łukasz after this event too, so he can follow up with you directly, or someone from Decerto can help you out. But I have one more question before we get to that.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Sure, go ahead.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Go ahead, finish what you're doing here.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, so I'll finish what I'm doing here. I just need to reattach the regions for my decision table — I'm in the view of version number two. Okay, so right now what I want to do is attach, allocate, the view of this particular decision table to all of the existing versions of the product. So I'll pick the versions that I want this particular version to be seen in — I'll change it. So now, on the left side, near the name of the decision table, I'll see the number that tells me which version I'm in right now, and I don't want to be in the second version right now — I want to change it to the third version. I'll go up, and I'll show you this thing that I already mentioned. So we have our decision table here — I'll enter edit mode, I'll copy and paste these values here, I'll save it like that, and then I can quickly upload the new version of decision tables, especially for this particular version. And as you can see, I've changed the values from the existing one to the new one, and those new ones are only visible in the third version of the product. So we can prepare in advance, and we can perform some batch testing, and so on and so forth.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Right, well, I'll tell you the poorly kept secret in my business: when we do analytical product research and write up features and things like that, the most popular one is always “export to Excel/CSV.” No matter how much AI we hear about, and everything else, it comes back to that. So that's a pretty thorough explanation of how this works, and it's very relatable, and it's great — getting to know you guys a little bit, and I see you have some global clients, some names I recognize. I guess a question I'd have for you is, how scalable is this? Do you have a key target market? Is it very large enterprise, small enterprises — do you have a specialty?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, so basically, we're a very scalable solution, and to be honest, we exist in some small companies with our solution, with a lot of data that's changing — and not necessarily only in the insurance industry, because rules are rules, and they exist in almost any kind of system — but from smaller companies, we're also visible, I'd say, among the biggest ones in the world too. I can throw out some names here, but I invite you to go to our website to read about our use cases — I think you'll find them interesting, and some even very familiar to your problems, your challenges that you're facing.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Yeah, I like — like I said, I recognized some of the names there, and I think for some of the audience you're reaching today, they probably aren't that familiar with Higson — or well, I'm sure that they are. Well, maybe you want to get to your closing here, so we can — we're not going to have much time for Q&A, but maybe if you want to summarize what we talked about today on a following slide...

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

I would love to do so, but I want to show you just one more thing — one specific thing that you actually mentioned. You mentioned AI and so on, and we don't like to stay behind — with Higson, we've also employed something that cooperates with AI. We basically use AI to help automate processes. So basically, those decision tables can be done manually, as I've just shown you, but we can also — I'll use version two, sorry, because it's connected to my demo — we've also figured out that creating AI logic would be super useful. So basically, we're creating AI model support, and you can train the AI to do your bidding, let's say, and I can show you how we can do it when we go back to your sales application...

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

We actually do have a little more time than I thought — I'm sorry, Łukasz, I was misreading my clock, I thought we were close. You actually have some time to go, and I'm enjoying the heck out of this. So please, go ahead.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

No, no, no, that's not a problem. So basically, I just want to show you one more thing. We trained our AI model, connected here, to help us, let's say, monitor the risk assessment of our customers. So basically, what we can do — as you can see, in this particular case, Mr. Michael has zero accidents, one traffic ticket, so he's a pretty good driver here — we don't have any alerts. But if we want, we can use this AI model to connect it, let's say, to one of the coverages, and ask it to check if our customers are reliable. So basically, I'll connect this decision table — because we kept it as a decision table — to the risk assessment here. I already copied the name, and I'll show you how easy it is to connect something new here to our system.

Sorry, I made a mistake here... Okay, and I've just connected the AI model here by copying the name of the existing decision table — it's like copying the link. When I save it and publish — of course, I need to publish all the changes — it'll be visible in our sales application. And by that, I'll show you what will happen. I'll go back one step, and I'll fill in some data here — let's put Mr. Michael under the scope of our underwriters here. So I'll give him 100 accidents and 100 tickets — usually, in some organizations, this is connected to some central repository of data, so it's pulled automatically. When I go back and hit “next” here, we'll see the alerts wherever we connected our model. So basically, I connected it here to take a look — it's a simple model, it's just pointing: “okay, here, we need to pay attention to this one, because he requires our underwriter's notice, because something is wrong, and we can retract, or we can delegate this task to further investigation.” Of course, you can train your AI model differently to do different tasks, but that automation also exists with the Higson product configurator. So it's quite a neat trick.

Yeah, so I think we can slowly wrap up our presentation.

I'll stop sharing my screen right now and go back to the presentation.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

No, this is great, this is really helpful, Łukasz. I want to tell our producer — I think I lost... I had some... I was looking at questions before, I seem to have lost my Q&A panel briefly. I don't know if you guys can refresh that for me, or if that's something I need to do, but I did see some good questions coming in. I want to remind everybody that you can submit questions now or later, and anything we don't get to today, we'll be sure to follow up on.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, I see some questions, so I've opened this Q&A panel so I can read them. If you have trouble, Jim — so the first question was: “What kind of training or preparation does a business team need to handle these changes?”

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Yeah, I saw that, that's the primary question — go ahead.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Yeah, it's basically a good question. The answer is super simple — I won't say “it depends” this time, I'll answer with a short story. I'm a business development manager for this particular product, and I had to learn it on my own — and to give you the scope of difficulty of this product, I'll tell you what my degree is: I'm a history teacher, playing around with sales, and it took me two days to learn how to use Higson properly. When you're a business user of insurance products, and you'll be handling insurance products, you'll have an easier job and an easier task to do. So usually, we propose a two-day training session for our customers, and the training is based on real-life examples — their own examples, to be honest — and because of the familiarity of the products and the situations being theirs, the learning curve is eased by that, and it's not rocket science, to be honest.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

We find — most researchers find — that a lot of these implementations and rollouts fail from a lack of training. So that's one thing, and I like that you mentioned earlier too — it was a very famous thing, many years ago, when the biggest software company in the world came up with this miraculous CRM product, and their motto was “we're going to change the way you do business” — and it didn't go over well, for some reason, with people, because they didn't want to change the way they did business, and it gets back to that. But so, I guess — are there guided help, assistance, things like that, to help with this too?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Yeah, so basically, we don't leave our customers alone. First, the training — you can choose the way of the training, you can have a trainer who explains every single step for you, you can do the training on our dedicated platform, but you're not left alone with the product afterward — we're always ready to help our customers if you have any kind of issues, we come and help you with the task. We have some customers who can't share the problem with us directly — they can just meet with us and explain verbally, and we then figure out the problem and the solutions with them, because it's a very sensitive area with the data. But it works — it works great, because we have specialists who've dedicated a huge part of their lives to being specialists in IT and insurance. So basically, this is done by people who know what they're doing, and what the insurance world is facing. So you'll never be left alone.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

And I guess you're going to tell me you probably don't need a lot of third-party consulting or system integration...

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

No, no, no, you don't need those.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

I had to ask, right?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

You have to ask.

You don't need those. No, to be honest, this product is so easy to learn itself that we had some situations — and that's a very good story for that — we keep our documentation available for our customers, so they can go through it — even free PDFs — to read it, and we've had a few customers who did their own research, read the documentation, and called us just to ask, “okay, Łukasz, what's the price?” — because they'd done everything, and I mean everything, from scratch — deployment on their own. They had this capability based on very clear documentation that we put out there for our customers. Of course, they didn't need any help, but the help was there if they wanted to use it.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Right, okay, well, maybe I'll let you have a look at that Q&A panel again, and see what else is coming in, because I'm still having a little trouble seeing what's going on on my end.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, so — “how is access to Higson controlled? Who can change what?” So basically, you can have dedicated teams to make modifications, and inside Higson, you can assign users very granularly. You can have users dedicated only to particular products, or even particular decision tables. We had a situation where we had a super-specialized person at our customer's site, who was “alpha and omega” in one specific product — he could wake up at midnight and recite everything about that product. So he could only edit that, because that was his main focus in the company — he didn't have rights to, for example, move anything else. He could see other products, for example, but the granularity of access he had was only to one particular thing, and we can do that very granularly — you can have different profiles for different departments. Actually, with this access, the sky's the limit — the vision of how you want to deploy it is the limit here, you can have separation by teams, by divisions, however you like.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

And the access — I think this is important, because I've spent a lot of time working on governance, and certainly there's, at one level, policy management, but I know a lot of insurers really want to optimize the business goals of their policy management. They don't want to just put guardrails up on everything and have access control. So I guess what you want is something that, whether it's through a single administrator, or because it's a captive system in the infrastructure, can interface with governance teams — they could see this also, or there's a way to control it that's auditable, like you said — but very important too.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

And there's also this one thing — when we're controlling things on our own, by, let's say, a single person on the product, it's not ideal, let's face it — that's why you have teams of people. And the “managing history” that I showed you allows you to have a full view of what was changing, how it's changing, and when it's changing — so basically, it helps you monitor the work and the progress, especially when you've divided the work for the team. One person will handle one chunk of the data, another person another chunk, and you can see what modifications have been made, and when — so you're not duplicating your work. So that's also, you know, mutually beneficial.

Of course, you need to have clear coordination with your system and colleagues, but you can see all of those changes, and that allows you to monitor all of it, and make those changes smoothly.

Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Is that repository something that's in Higson?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

So basically, Higson has its own small database built in — we use an H2 database that stores some of the data inside, so it's always there, it's accessible, and it's there. Of course, it's on the customer's side, so it's accessible by them.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Great, okay, that's so far so good — sounds very interesting. I think we have time for maybe one more question, if you want to pull something up there, and then he's going to share a slide with his info on it also, at the end.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

That's true — I'm focusing on the Q&A right now.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Of course — one of the most important things is always forgotten. So, a good picture, by the way, Łukasz.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Oh, thank you — it's actually in our office in Warsaw, it's a beautiful place, I invite you.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Another good thing — let people know you're in Warsaw. Do you have a presence in North America, other markets?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Yes, of course — we have our presence, we opened our office in the United States, and we have employees there now, we're also actively recruiting new employees for Decerto — we're also on the ground in the United States, especially since we'd like to spread our wings there. So that presence is, let's say, mandatory for us — it's our own goal to establish a new base there, let's call it that.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Okay, alright, well, we're down to just a couple of minutes left before we have to conclude, and thanks everybody for staying with us — we'll send along a recording of this session as soon as we have it available for you.

But Łukasz, if there's any small question, or if you want to summarize, or if there's anything you really want to get across at the close of this session today, I'll leave the floor to you.

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

Okay, so one more thing — I'm always available for contact, you can see my information here. If you'd like to know more about Higson and Decerto, just reach out to me. And one more thing — we'd gladly help you with any kind of problem, especially in insurance, so just reach out, and we're there for you.

Sorry, that's the only thing I wanted to add — thank you, Jim.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

Well, that's what people want — well, we used to say they want “one throat to choke,” right? So I guess that's you, right?

[Speaker: Łukasz Niedośpiał]

That's me, exactly.

[Speaker: Jim Erickson]

But I'm sure there are more good folks over there with you too, ready to help folks. So again, to take note of this — this is how to get a hold of Łukasz. A very informative session today — it brought me up to date on product configuration, versus just the whole policy management world, the heavier tools that aren't nearly as customizable and configurable. The most important thing I got out of here today was the time to market — cutting down those bottlenecks, those lags, those revisions, all the back-and-forth — everybody's very familiar with this. So I think a lot of products are headed in this direction, and it's great to see Decerto joining the ranks of companies that I'm familiar with, who are really trying to forward the business mission for the end users. So with that, I'm going to wrap things up today. I want to thank Łukasz, who is the business development manager for the Higson product with Decerto, for a great presentation — he's available, reach out to him. And for Digital Insurance, happy to have been here to moderate — thanks to them for bringing me in to moderate this session, I always learn something, so I get benefits out of it too. And with that, I'll also thank you, the audience, for staying with us. And with that, I'll say so long, everybody, and have a great week.

Thank you. Bye.

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