SwissCaution Migrates to Innovative Insurance Platform with msg on AWS

Switzerland-based insurance company SwissCaution consolidated around 25 on-premises databases and its back-office insurance applications into a single platform called msg Unified Administration Platform (msg.UAP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). SwissCaution can now deliver new insurance products faster and at less cost. The scalable and extensible cloud-based solution supports SwissCaution’s future growth and allows its partners to connect to its back-office processes and gain added-value functionality for the first time. The platform also complies with relevant security and financial sector regulations.

SwissCaution is a Switzerland-based insurance company and part of the Swiss Mobiliar group. Founded in 1991, it was the first insurance company in Switzerland to offer rental or lease deposit guarantees without the need for a bank deposit. That means that individuals and businesses can avoid tying up significant sums of their own money. Regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, FINMA, SwissCaution has more than 400,000 customers and manages more than CHF1 billion ($1.12 billion) in rental guarantees.

The company was finding it difficult to innovate and launch new products from its legacy insurance platform. The system had been built in-house over many years and consisted of about 25 separate components running on an on-premises data center. Although the individual components worked well, the system as a whole was inefficient and contained duplicated and redundant data. Modifying an existing product or introducing a new one was complicated and time-consuming, requiring staff to make changes to multiple systems and databases. “Our systems contained a lot of duplicate data,” says Christian Lambelet, head of digital transformation and strategic projects at SwissCaution. “When we wanted to change anything, we had to use multiple tools and change multiple databases.”

SwissCaution couldn’t easily extend its platform to support its key partners, which wanted to connect their own systems to SwissCaution’s back-office infrastructure. In addition, its siloed design had a negative impact on customer service capabilities, because although employees had a view of each single contract, they didn’t have an overall view on the customer’s history. The company wanted to unify its disparate back-office systems under a single, centralized insurance platform so its partners could connect their systems and its staff could focus on delivering new products and services instead of maintaining infrastructure. In 2020, SwissCaution consulted with local AWS Partner msg—a specialist in insurance technology—and decided to migrate to msg Unified Administration Platform (msg.UAP), an off-the-shelf, cloud-based insurance application.

The project took around 2 years to complete. SwissCaution spent the first few months auditing and analyzing the on-premises infrastructure. It built the required architecture on AWS, before migrating all of the data. After everything had been tested, and SwissCaution’s employees were properly trained to use msg.UAP, the company switched over to its new platform and infrastructure.

The foundation of its platform is built using Amazon EC2 Windows Instances, a secure, reliable, and high-performance environment for deploying Windows-based applications and workloads. Its applications were containerized using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications. SwissCaution consolidated its multiple databases using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which lets you set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud with just a few clicks. To efficiently connect user requests to its applications, the company used Amazon Route 53, a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet applications.

The migration to msg.UAP on AWS has transformed SwissCaution’s ability to innovate and reduced the cost of delivering new insurance products. By partnering with msg, SwissCaution has reduced the time it takes to develop and release a new insurance product. Using its new infrastructure, msg helped SwissCaution launch a brand-new product in December 2023. It took about 6 months to build, and Lambelet says the process was much faster and less expensive than was previously possible. “If we had to build the new product in-house with our old system, it would have taken at least five of our developers at least twice as long,” says Lambelet. “With msg, and using AWS, we can develop much faster and be more cost effective.”

The reduction in complexity means that updating existing products also takes less time and costs a fraction of what it did using its previous setup. This means that it’s possible to develop new products or functionalities that would probably have been impossible to implement in the old fragmented systems. SwissCaution now has the agility required to attract new customers in a highly competitive market.

With its customer data secured in the cloud, SwissCaution’s flexible and extensible platform allows its partners to easily connect to its back-office processes. For example, it would be possible for its partner Swiss Post to connect to SwissCaution’s msg.UAP platform and use its near-real-time document checking and validation processes. “msg.UAP allows us to give trusted partners access to added-value functionalities that we quickly build in the cloud,” says Lambelet. “This is the future.”

SwissCaution’s cloud migration also enabled the company to maintain compliance with the relevant data security regulations and financial rules overseen by FINMA. The company was able to demonstrate to FINMA that its new platform, using AWS, implements strict security measures for controlling access to customer data.