Helping businesses protect their assets

INTRODUCTION

A rising star in the insurance sector

When insurance expertise meets the latest technology, amazing things happen. Finlex is the German company going from start-up to scale-up by creating the ultimate platform for commercial and industrial insurance. Finlex not only provides comprehensive products to help corporations protect their business, but brokers can also connect to its bespoke platform to quickly and easily compare the latest deals on the market. The journey doesn’t end there, Finlex digitizes every step in the process, from risk assessments and making offers, to signing contracts and simplifying renewals. In short, it’s a game changer.

Founded in Germany in 2015, the company is already breaking into Austria and France and has doubled revenues and headcount every year since 2017.

“Lots of insurance companies compete on cost, but our differentiator is our focus on using the latest and greatest technology. We always follow best practice guidance and make sure the tech team is aligned with our business goals, so everyone shares in company success,” says Milad Rezazadeh, Chief Technology Officer at Finlex.

And behind the scenes, one solution is keeping developers happy, streamlining growth, and speeding up time-to-market — MongoDB Atlas.

THE CHALLENGE

Finding the best technology to build a business

Before launching its business, Finlex needed a platform that could integrate with partner systems to capture information around insurance products and make them searchable. “We service customers in a multi-tenanted way, so it was important to find a scalable database that supports APIs and has great security,” explains Rezazadeh. “I’ve used traditional relational databases before, so I knew that a NoSQL solution was better for our business.”

As a start-up, the team was also expecting to be continuously adapting its product to better support customer needs, so the solution needed to be flexible and capable of accelerating time-to-market. Because MongoDB offers an adaptable schema, it simplified development and reduced technical constraints associated with frequent changes to the data models. Furthermore, MongoDB Atlas enabled Finlex to minimize administrative tasks by streamlining operations, allowing them to focus on developing features and growing the business.

THE SOLUTION

Scalable, high performing infrastructure

The company implemented MongoDB with support from a managed service provider in 2015, switching to MongoDB Atlas in 2017. “MongoDB is our database of choice. The company takes care of admin, security, maintenance, and provisioning servers, so our internal team is free to focus on developing our platform,” recalls Rezazadeh. “It enabled us to offer customers a premium service from day one with low provisioning and set-up costs.”

Over the years, Finlex has accumulated more staff, customers, and data, but MongoDB Atlas can be scaled by increasing the number of clusters in a matter of clicks. It’s also simple to onboard new brokers and provide them with access to the system without the need for additional software.

Today, the company runs all microservices on MongoDB, which gives developers a standard environment to work in as well as reducing the number of mistakes.

“The schemas and database documents in MongoDB help the development team to be more productive and release new features faster,” comments Hossein Rahmani, Head of Product Engineering at Finlex. “MongoDB is a dream to work in. The team loves features like autocomplete. When you spend every day working with complicated technology, it’s nice to have a solution with a more consumer-like feel.”

THE RESULTS

Supercharging company growth

There’s no doubt that the future’s bright at Finlex, and MongoDB plays a vital role in keeping company growth sustainable, streamlined, and efficient.

“With MongoDB Atlas, we can continuously improve our platform and create amazing customer experiences, but the beauty of MongoDB as a company is that it’s very focused on giving its customers an amazing experience too,” comments Rahmani. “Every time we think of a new feature that would make life easier, MongoDB is always about to launch it. Being customer focused means it’s always one step ahead.”

The next feature Finlex is excited to explore is MongoDB Atlas Search. The Finlex development team ran a successful proof of concept with support from MongoDB, and plans to go live soon. Based on early development benchmarks, Finlex was able to quickly deliver the search feature thanks to the performance of Atlas Search. ”Atlas Search has a significant edge over competing alternatives because it is already built into MongoDB Atlas, doesn’t require provisioning of additional tools and has significant impact on reducing the development effort”, explains Rezazadeh.

Finlex is also looking into MongoDB Atlas Data Federation to simplify aggregating, transforming, and enriching data and making it available for real-time applications and analytics.