Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Breaks into Embedded Insurance Market with Zero&One on AWS

Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Company (BKIC) diversified its sales channels to offer embedded insurance to its partners using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its existing API product was inefficient and slow, so BKIC worked with AWS Partner Zero&One to build a middleware layer to manage its APIs, resulting in a 66 percent increase in speed and 98 percent reduction in API size. Using API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS Control Tower, BKIC cut costs and improved the performance and efficiency of its embedded insurance platform.

Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Company (BKIC) was established in 1975 and is the only company operating as a national insurance company in both Bahrain and Kuwait with an A- rating. Having traditionally sold insurance policies directly to its customers, BKIC wanted to diversify its sales channels and offer embedded insurance, which allows partners such as airlines, telecoms, and fintech firms to easily offer specialist insurance policies to their customers.

BKIC bought a specialized off-the-shelf API product to allow fast communications between its core insurance platform and its embedded insurance partners. But it was disappointed with the performance because the product made inefficient use of bandwidth and could only process one API at a time. “The out-of-the box API solution didn’t meet our expectations,” says Zeyad Zainal, senior manager for digital transformation at BKIC. “The APIs weren’t up to our standards.”

BKIC’s infrastructure was running from an on-premises data center and Zainal wanted to find a way to improve the company’s API solution. He also wanted to make the company’s infrastructure more flexible and scalable and, after investigating many different long-term options, he chose to use AWS because of its diverse range of managed services. BKIC chose to work with AWS Partner Zero&One and together they built a 3-year digital transformation plan to better manage its APIs and migrate its critical systems to the cloud.

In February 2023, Zero&One started working with BKIC to create a middleware layer that could handle its API calls more efficiently. The first problem was that the third-party API system required all fields of every API to be transmitted for each API call. The majority of these fields were usually unchanged, so most of the data being transferred was redundant, wasting resources. “We wanted Zero&One to find a way so only changed fields need to be transferred,” says Zainal. “This would reduce the size of data transmissions, improve performance, and reduce bandwidth usage.”

Zero&One used Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. This was run using AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. The middleware layer also uses AWS Control Tower, which orchestrates multiple AWS services on your behalf while maintaining the security and compliance needs of your organization, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

The new middleware layer was completed in May 2023 and orchestrates all API interactions. Now only changed fields need to be transferred, making API calls faster and simpler. The average time taken to request, process, and respond to an API fell from 120 milliseconds (ms) to 40 ms, a 66 percent reduction. The average size of an API fell from 25 KB to 450 B—98 percent smaller. Serverless environments scale easily, so whereas previously BKIC’s system could only process one API at a time, it is now capable of processing up to 1,000 APIs every second. “Using AWS Lambda means we only pay for the resources that we use,” says Zainal. “Our embedded insurance platform is now faster, more robust, and scalable because we’re using AWS and partnering with Zero&One.”

Zainal says this project marks the beginning of BKIC’s journey into the cloud, and over the next 2 years he expects to work with Zero&One to migrate more infrastructure to AWS. “Zero&One is a partner that really understands AWS and is able to quickly transform an idea into a working product or feature,” says Zainal. “We have a very good relationship with Zero&One and I can see us working with them and with AWS for a long time to come.”

The next step for BKIC is to build a data lake and investigate how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could improve efficiencies in other areas of the insurance business. “We want to see if ML and AI can improve our claims management, underwriting, and risk analysis processes,” says Zainal.

The API project has cemented the relationship between BKIC, Zero&One, and AWS, with Zainal looking to migrate more core systems into the cloud, as well as replicating the entire API middleware layer at their Kuwait-based branch.“We are a working case study for our branch in Kuwait,”says Zainal. “Because AWS services can be easily replicated, they can copy our setup and instantly start experiencing the same benefits we are enjoying.”