Coretech Insight Report: Insurers Can See Up to $25M Revenue Gain

A Coretech Insight Study Commissioned by Socotra

Insurers know that speed and agility are key to growth. But they struggle to quantify the value of investing in new technologies in terms of speed-to-market and revenue. To address this challenge, Coretech Insight, an independent advisory firm focused on core technology for the insurance industry, conducted a breakthrough study modeling three real-world scenarios to assess the economic value of speed-to-market, using publicly available industry and government data and validation by senior industry participants.

The analysis compared product launches for incumbent systems against new cloud-native agile platforms and found that insurers that launch products faster by deploying cloud agile technology are able to generate a revenue gain of as much as $25 million over five years.

What will you learn from this report? You’ll get the detailed information supporting these results and learn how findings like these were determined in this analysis:

  • The benefits of shorter time-to-market exceeded the costs of implementing and operating new cloud technology by a wide margin—as much as 40 times the cost of implementation.
  • Cloud agile technology can trim product launch times to a matter of months versus typical timeframes of a year to 18 months for outdated systems.
  • Cloud agile platform product launches enable insurers to capture revenue that would otherwise be lost to extended launch timeframes.
  • Insurers are forfeiting millions of dollars in new premiums due to delays common with incumbent systems.

Get your copy of this ground-breaking, must-read study today.

AWS and Socotra Break New Ground in PAS Performance Testing

Introduction

In a first-of-its kind release for the insurance industry, Socotra and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have collaborated to publish a fully audited software performance test, as detailed in a recent white paper. While published performance results are common throughout the broader software industry, this marks a groundbreaking moment for insurance technology.

AWS, the world’s leading cloud provider, powers such organizations as Netflix and Toyota1, making it an ideal partner for this project. Socotra has a longstanding partnership with AWS.

Why Performance Matters for Today’s Insurers

As insurers adopt innovative ways to distribute products and meet customer needs, performance has become more critical than ever.

checkmark
Direct Insurance: Insurers are increasingly selling directly to customers, particularly in home and auto lines2. While direct sales may never completely replace agents, it’s a distribution strategy that continues to grow.
checkmark
Portals: Many customers buy insurance through agents, but expect the ability to manage their policies — for example, updating information or filing claims — via online portals. Customers are used to high-performance consumer sites like Amazon, and aren’t willing to lower their standards for insurers.
checkmark
Embedded: Embedded insurance is becoming more popular. For example, it’s now common to see insurance sold alongside travel or consumer electronics purchases, and use cases such as small business are emerging3. These sales are often integrated with high-performing consumer sites that expect matching speed and reliability from their embedded partners.
checkmark
Agents and Brokers: Agents and brokers aren’t immune to frustration with poor website performance. While significantly more forgiving than end customers, they still have preferences and they have significant influence on customers. Displeased agents and brokers impact customer experience, which can increase customer acquisition costs and lower retention rates4.
checkmark
Aggregators: Especially prevalent in Europe, aggregators compare quotes from multiple insurance providers. They require real-time quotes, which is a struggle for many insurers to provide. As a result, insurers often resort to creating parallel systems to deliver estimates rather than actual quotes. Besides increasing IT complexity, this approach also increases drop-off when a customer discovers the final price differs from the estimated quote.

In every case above, external stakeholders are now exposed to the performance and reliability of insurers’ core systems. Traditional IT vendors are not prepared for this level of exposure, and it shows in the systems they’re delivering.

Performance concepts like latency, uptime, and throughput are commonplace in the broader software industry, and there are well-established practices for delivering high performance cloud. Anyone using online email or search has experienced high performance cloud platforms.

Test Methodology

AWS and Socotra conducted two test scenarios to evaluate performance:

Quote-to-issue: Initial account creation and validation, followed by quote creation and subsequent profession all the way to issuance.

Quote-to-price
: Initial account creation and validation, followed by quote creation and progression to pricing, but without issuing the policy.

Both scenarios were executed in Socotra’s typical production environment with multiple runs to validate results and identify any outliers. Each run consisted of 15 minutes of constant load, with additional time allocated for ramping up and down concurrent users.

To simulate realistic quote variance, policies included randomized coverage details. The requested throughput was:

Scenario 1 Load: 11,500 quote-to-issue transactions per minute 

Scenario 2 Load: 12,500 quote-to-price transactions per minute

Both scenarios were created using a typical personal automobile product configuration from a recent Progressive Auto filing in the state of Indiana. The system was pre-loaded with over 20 million quotes and policies. All policies were randomly generated with between one and three vehicle exposures, one to three drivers, and annual mileage ranging from 10,000 to 120,000. The tests simulated a gradual, uninterrupted increase in concurrent user count from 1,000 to 5,000.

The scenarios isolated tests for many common actions, including account create, account validate, quote create, quote validate, quote price, quote underwrite, quote accept, and quote issue.

AWS monitored and confirmed the accuracy of all tests.


Test Results

The test results were remarkable, showcasing Socotra’s ability to scale to the quality standards of common consumer websites.


Scenario One: Quote-to-Issue

In this scenario, Socotra handled 11,500 policies per minute with 5,000 concurrent users. Impressively, 95% of API requests in the quote-to-issue flow were completed in under 300 milliseconds (ms), demonstrating consistently fast performance for each transaction type.


Scenario Two: Quote-to-Price (“Comparative Rater”)

In the quote-to-price scenario, Socotra achieved a rate of 12,500 quote pricings per minute with 5,000 concurrent users. Here, 95% of API requests were completed in less than 250 milliseconds (ms). This consistent performance exhibited minimal increase in response times even under higher loads.

These outstanding results were achieved with an AWS cost of less than $300 per day, highlighting both the performance efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Socotra’s cloud-native architecture.

Autoscaling

Insurance is relatively new to the cloud, and much so-called “cloud” software in the industry is merely ported versions of existing systems. This approach misses the true benefits of the cloud. True cloud includes features such as continual upgrades and high reliability. Another key advantage of modern cloud infrastructure is autoscaling.

As previously described, these performance tests gradually ramped the load to 5,000 concurrent users. During this process, the system autoscaled to handle the increased load. Although performance dipped slightly during the autoscaling process, it quickly stabilized and improved at the higher scale. As shown in the white paper, autoscaling appears as a brief period of slower performance, which immediately recovers to performance faster than before the autoscaling occurred.

This is possible because Socotra consists of numerous microservices running redundantly. The redundancy allows Socotra to achieve high reliability (see “Reliability” section below), and also allows for high performance because parallelized services can easily scale up simply by adding more instances. Modern cloud providers automate this process, and Socotra leverages this automation to its advantage.


Reliability

Of course, performance only matters if the system is actually operational. Reliability matters. Socotra recently highlighted this in a recent blog post announcing the company’s 2023 uptime stats:

circle-chkmark-yellow
Average 2023 uptime across all customers was >99.995%
circle-chkmark-yellow
Average <26 minutes of downtime in 2023, including both planned and unplanned downtime
circle-chkmark-yellow
No Socotra customer had more than 0.03% downtime in 2023
These statistics include combined downtime resulting from the 50 upgrades each Socotra customer underwent in 2023, plus any unplanned downtime. Even the most optimal performance is irrelevant if the system isn’t available when needed.
Looking Forward

These results clearly demonstrate how Socotra is setting new standards for performance and reliability. The collaboration with AWS highlights the potential for insurers to leverage advanced cloud technologies to meet modern performance expectations. We anticipate further innovations as Socotra continues to drive the industry forward, using proven practices to elevate insurance technology for both insurers and end customers.