To set itself apart from its competitors, the Madrid-based multinational insurance agency MAPFRE works to find ways to proactively and unobtrusively make its customers’ lives better.
MAPFRE’s customer-facing apps make support available 24/7, simplifying tasks like making claims, booking medical appointments, requesting roadside assistance, and managing finances. Its charitable arm—Fundación MAPFRE—goes even further: it connects families of people living with acquired brain injuries to useful resources, develops games to teach children about road safety, and even gives users a whistlestop tour of rare artifacts they can go and visit in museums. And behind its broad catalog of apps is just one database—MongoDB Atlas.
“MongoDB Atlas means we don’t need to create a separate database for each use case. It gives developers a great user experience, which means we can adapt apps to meet changing needs quickly and easily, and it’s cloud agnostic, which gives us greater flexibility as a global company with varying regional needs,” said Andrés Hevia Vega, Deputy Director of Architecture at MAPFRE.
MAPFRE introduced MongoDB in 2017 after building its business on relational databases. By doing so, the company has streamlined development, enabling rapid app adaptation, a seamless user experience, and cloud-agnostic flexibility for global operations.
Introducing developers to a non-relational database
Over the years, apps have gone from being one of several ways customers engage with a company to the go-to way many customers interact with organizations. And staff increasingly also need highly available apps to do their work efficiently. Both create a need for developers to work flexibly and at speed—releasing new features for existing apps, modernizing legacy ones to ensure service continuity, and building new ones to meet changing demands.
While relational databases served MAPFRE well for years, leveraging MongoDB Atlas in new use cases provided an opportunity to change development processes and increase productivity. “Relational databases use tables, but our developers work with JSON objects,” said Andrés Hevia. This is a common issue as most programming languages use object-oriented models. As he explained: “They had to carry out object-relational mapping (ORM) against data organized in tables, but there isn’t always a one-to-one match for every data type. For example, applications rely on in-memory objects that don’t directly correspond to database records.”
ORM wasn’t the only headache for developers. Updating an app required changing the data stored in the relational database. This increased the risk of a service outage when the app was redeployed.
We had to encourage and guide the team to adopt new ways of working after decades of working with a relational database. But MongoDB Atlas made that easier,” explained Andrés Hevia. “It’s a well-established platform that we trust to run critical apps, and it’s been designed with developers in mind.”
An experience designed for developer productivity
MongoDB Atlas stores JSON objects directly in the database, enabling developers to work with native data in the programming language they’re already familiar with. Its flexible schema keeps related data together in the same collection and can be updated without risking a service outage.
The team can also do more with MongoDB Atlas’s advanced feature set—they use geospatial queries for use cases such as the Help Flash emergency beacon that drivers can switch on if they break down. This automatically generates a notification to send help using geolocation data and lights up to alert passing drivers to the broken down vehicle. Meanwhile, object storage keeps data organized and graphs provide insights into geolocation data. Free text search makes data accessible, and the database scales in line with demand.
“We love that as a cloud-native database, MongoDB Atlas is designed for horizontal and vertical scaling. We also use read scaling to speed up queries,” said Andrés Hevia. “Fetching data for reports would impact performance if we only had one node. We replicate data sets to a separate node, so queries don’t impact app performance.”
Embracing a culture of continuous learning
By using MongoDB Atlas, MAPFRE has been through a cultural shift and made a valuable partnership. As Andrés Hevia explained, “We’ve got a great relationship with MongoDB’s solution architects. We’re in constant contact and have regular calls to share news or ask for guidance.”
The insurer runs webinars and hackathons to share this knowledge internally to assist its IT team to upskill. “When we recommend MongoDB to another team, they don’t have to take our word for it. They can use the Community edition to build mock-ups of their apps. If they want to keep using it, the support is there to help them take it further,” added Andrés Hevia.
And the quarterly releases mean MAPFRE gets more value from its IT spend without investing in new technologies—for example, following the launch of MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, it now has the opportunity to explore AI for chatbots in its external contact centre and for managing internal IT tickets.
“MongoDB Atlas has opened up more opportunities and given us a competitive edge. We’ve got the agility to create new apps quickly and to modernize old ones easily and cost effectively,” said Andrés Hevia. “It doesn’t complicate life for developers; it empowers them to work faster and it’s easier to maintain than our legacy environment.”
It also eliminates the risk of vendor lock-in, which is particularly important to a multinational company like MAPFRE. With offices in more than 47 countries, it needs the flexibility to have a multicloud environment if it needs to switch vendor to comply with local data security requirements, for example.
With MongoDB Atlas, MAPFRE is confident it can adapt and pivot to meet whatever the future holds—from meeting changing customer and employee expectations to adopting exciting new technologies like generative AI. In fact, Andrés Hevia is so committed to being at the cutting edge of innovation with MongoDB that he leads the MongoDB User Group in Madrid. This community meets regularly to share insights, nurture skills, socialize, and support each other.
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