THEIR CHALLENGE
Confronting fragmentation in commercial insurance
Commercial insurance has long struggled with fragmentation and inefficiency. Despite the introduction of platforms and technologies that aim to digitize specific tasks and business lines, the market is slow and fragmented; connectivity between systems remains minimal, and many processes are still handled manually.
As a result, the process of buying and selling commercial insurance—which is already highly complex due to the nature of risk assessment—remains largely outdated. Brokers are required to invest substantial effort in gathering and delivering data to insurers, who must then analyze the information, make key underwriting decisions, and communicate responses back through the same disjointed channels.
Willis Towers Watson (WTW) is a leading global advisory, insurance brokerage, and risk management powerhouse. It wanted to find a way to digitize the whole process effectively to create an online marketplace where brokers can access information about risks to insurers, and insurers can return algorithmic decisions—or decisions in markets where algorithmic trading is not appropriate—much faster.
"We asked ourselves, can we effectively take something that traditionally takes hours, days and weeks, and turn it into something that takes seconds or minutes?” said Alex Morris-Tarry, Chief Information Officer at WTW.
The vision was to create Neuron, a comprehensive digital trading platform for the commercial insurance market. Neuron would act as a powerful digital distribution channel that connects brokers with underwriters, enabling rapid and standardized flows of risk at scale and across multiple lines of business.
Delivering this would, however, require a powerful, complex, and flexible platform capable of handling varied data types. However, unlike other industries where data volume is the primary challenge, the value of the data managed by Neuron would also be a defining factor.
OUR SOLUTION
A flexible, scalable, and secure foundation
The right choice of database was also critical—one that could handle Neuron’s API-driven connectivity, deliver the right workflows through these APIs, and deliver useable, valuable data to insurers.
“We can’t just put in a monolith and assume that it’s going to work for the next 20 years,” says Morris-Tarry. “This is an internal system, it’s a client-facing system, and it’s a multi-tenant system. We’re providing access to many, many different clients, both insurers and brokers. We have to be able to change while still giving access to, for example, older versions of APIs for people who can’t move as quickly. So we need tools that give us the ability to flex and stretch.”
Other key requirements included maintaining the security of sensitive financial data, while also providing the power and flexibility to remain at the market’s forefront.
“We want to make sure the tools we use let us continue to innovate and build our solution in a modular way,” Morris-Tarry adds. “We use best-of-breed technologies, and as new opportunities emerge, we want to be able to adopt them and compose the solution that produces the best outcomes for our customers. Our ability to move with the times is a major selling point.”
It was clear to Morris-Tarry that a traditional relational database wouldn’t deliver the flexibility that Neuron required. The solution was MongoDB Atlas, a Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution which includes everything required to operate a database in the cloud and the ability to develop and evolve as the market grew and embraced new innovations.
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