Insurers are facing unprecedented competition and uncertainty. Offering an exceptional customer experience is a prerequisite to stand out in this increasingly crowded industry.

Even Zurich Insurance – one of the most well-recognized global providers – is not immune to these pressures. Zurich Insurance UK (Zurich) provides life, investment, and property and casualty coverage for over 4 million customers. As their business strategy evolves to meet the needs of their customers, so has the need for new technology.

In 2015 Zurich adopted the Mendix low-code platform to bring greater flexibility and agility into their development operations. They have since delivered nearly 30 applications that modernize legacy processes and address bespoke development needs in support of their customer and employee experiences.

Scalable Rapid Development

For decades Zurich was able to rely on traditional programming and Lotus Notes to deliver new business solutions. Over time these systems became legacy, and Zurich’s limited IT resources had to be spent on maintenance and support.

It became a challenge for business people to get new software – especially smaller projects – prioritized and delivered quickly.

In 2015 Zurich began exploring low-code platforms, including Mendix and OutSystems. They ultimately selected Mendix, which stood out technically for its:

• Cloud-native capabilities
• Ease of deployment
• Testing and quality tools
• Reusability
• Collaboration features

“We chose Mendix for several reasons. The platform’s functionality stood out, but it was Mendix’s digital enablement offering that made a big difference for us. As an organization new to low-code, their commitment to our success was crucial,” said Renita Furtado, Mendix Low-Code Platform Lead at Zurich.

The Mendix team at Zurich was formed in 2016 with Furtado joining in 2017 as part of a lean group of five. Today, she oversees a team that has more than tripled in size and consists of developers and SCRUM masters.

“I started working with Mendix during a rotation and immediately enjoyed the experience. The ability to deliver impactful solutions for our customers was amazing, and that excitement has only grown over the past eight years,” she said.

Adopting a new platform and securing buy-in across the organization required intention.

Zurich does this by focusing on three strategic pillars: customer, simplification, and innovation. Their development team aligns Mendix projects to these areas, ensuring that new applications are impacting key business metrics.

Simplifying Legacy Systems and Processes

Today, Zurich has delivered nearly 30 Mendix applications. “It’s a varied mixture of applications supporting different areas of the business and with varying degrees of complexity. A number of these are multi-phase projects with very complex integrations,” said Furtado.

Many of Zurich’s low-code projects provide simplification in support of their customer experience. Early in their low-code journey, Zurich invested heavily in migrating applications from Lotus Notes to Mendix.

“We had a number of applications that we not only re-platformed to Mendix – but actually redeveloped. That distinction is important, because we’ve also improved the nature of those applications and processes,” said Furtado.

These applications cover processes such as electronic fund transfers and impact users across finance, operations, and underwriting. Using Mendix, Zurich realized £700K in savings as compared to their estimates with high code development and has delivered systems that are now more stable and usable.

More recently, Zurich developed an application to generate policy documents. Previously, these documents took hours to create using Word templates and Excel macros.

The Zurich DevOps team saw an opportunity to make this process more efficient with Mendix. The new application uses Mulesoft to broker an integration with SmartCOMM for document generation. Underwriters carry out the entire process in a modern and intuitive Mendix app – which has reduced document generation time from hours to seconds.

The new application is more efficient and enables Zurich to uphold a higher level of consistency and quality throughout the process. These improvements have had a positive impact on Zurich’s employees, and ultimately, their ENPS (employee net promoter score).

Enabling Experimentation and Innovation

With Mendix, Zurich can also deliver solutions to support short-term business requirements. Low-code provides newfound capabilities to rapidly prototype at a lower investment than traditional programming.

“We have been able to develop certain applications with Mendix that would have been more difficult to progress past the business case stage due to the timing or resource constraints,” said Furtado.

In 2019, Zurich developed FaceQuote – a mobile app that used selfies to estimate a user’s age and provide them a custom life insurance quote – in just 1 week with Mendix.

Zurich then replicated this success with TimeFlies, which came to fruition in just a few weeks. The application was delivered to support a marketing campaign around pensions and drive greater awareness of Zurich’s products in a fun and buzzworthy way.

The application took users through a quiz about pop culture and world events. It would use the results to show how accurately they perceived timing and would then direct them to pension plan resources. Both applications successfully helped Zurich to capture and process thousands of new leads, and then were retired when no longer needed.

Zurich also uses Mendix to experiment with emerging technologies that may have otherwise been inaccessible without additional platform investments or specialized team members.

Lessons from a Low-Code Leader

After eight years delivering a variety of Mendix applications, Furtado and the DevOps team have their fair share of successes and learnings. 

1.  Define your vision and value.

When rolling out any technology platform, there will always be team members who are resistant to change. Defining your ‘why’ early on – and then proving how you uphold it – establishes credibility.

Furtado’s team has established a guiding mission statement for their work with Mendix: they exist to further Zurich’s business growth by enabling people – both employees and customers.

Zurich has made strides in connecting Mendix projects to the tenets of their business strategy. However, it is a more intensive exercise to drill down to the dollars and cents. Furtado says that it is well worth it, and something that the team is still refining today.

“For people early on in their Mendix journey, I recommend that you start capturing value from your first project. Value is one of the things that gets neglected sometimes, and if you don’t put pen to paper then you don’t really have anything tangible,” said Furtado.

2. Build – and nurture – the right team.

The team takes a hybrid approach as a Center of Excellence, with three small development teams and then a separate Operations team. Dividing up roles and responsibilities avoids context switching and keeps roles more clearly defined.

To improve retention and ensure that their team remains dynamic, Zurich takes measures such as:

• Expanding the pool of hirable talent for Mendix roles by recruiting from external bootcamps.
• Creating a “new starter” journey, which pairs new team members with a buddy and gets them RAD certified so that they can feel a sense of belonging and impact within their first months on the job.
• Rotating team members between roles in the CoE so that they don’t feel stagnant in their work.

3. Adapt your processes to move fast.

As part of their Mendix adoption, Zurich was fully committed to shifting from a waterfall way of working to Agile. Additionally, there were instances where Zurich adapted their existing development processes to keep up with pace of low-code.

One area of improvement was the change request process for smaller application updates or incidents. These requests could get stuck with a review board for a few weeks at a time, making a quick fix not so quick. By building trust in their team and the platform, this process was redefined.

“We got this authority agreed that if a change comes and we’ve worked on it and tested it, then it can go in straight away. The whole cycle time has been reduced significantly, and that is a good customer outcome,” Furtado shared.

4. Figure out where Mendix fits in your development landscape.

While Zurich has grown to tackle more complex projects, they would advise to start small in your early days. “For your first project pick something that is important for your organization, but not so important that if it goes wrong, you’ll lose the confidence of the organization,” Furtado said.

Today, the team is working on a “patterns document” to define when it is best to use Mendix versus something else in the Zurich development toolkit.

“Mendix is like a Swiss Army knife – incredibly versatile. Our patterns document will help us strategically decide when to use Mendix in our development toolkit and ensure the right fit for each project,” she said.

5. Structure Mendix to support you as you scale.

One advantage of a low-code platform like Mendix as compared to traditional programming is its potential for reuse over time. Finding areas or functionality that are repeatable brings efficiency into new projects and helps to uphold a high level of application governance.

“We’ve made sure to create our security measures as part of reusable components within an app template, so that there is no worrying if these standards were missed,” said Furtado.

Zurich also has parameters for leveraging quality and test automation tools from Mendix to uphold the integrity of their applications during development, and over time.

The Future of Software Development

The value of low-code at Zurich can be seen in outcomes such as:

• Improved collaboration between business and the DevOps team.
• More opportunities for team members to contribute to transformation projects in support of Zurich’s business objectives.
• The ability to be more agile and responsive to business and customer needs.

“For us, the value of low-code is evident in the positive feedback we’ve received. When team members say things like ‘this application is a breath of fresh air,’ it validates the effort and impact of our work,” said Furtado.

There is still plenty on the horizon for Zurich as they continue to scale out their use of Mendix. Some of the team’s future priorities include:

• Further nurturing their people by defining long-term career paths for Mendix developers and adhering more rigidly to Agile practices.
• Maximizing scalability by moving towards a microservices architecture and positioning Mendix for more critical business transformation projects.
• Promoting innovation by taking full advantage of platform features like AI/ML features and Mendix’s Snowflake connector.

The work is never done, but the team has a strong foundation to build from as they mature.