NRB and Ethias Launch a 100 Percent Digital Insurance on AWS

With the help of partner NRB and AWS, Belgian insurer Ethias launched a 100 percent digital insurance, Flora, in nine months. Flora is improving customer experience, modernizing traditional development methods and ways of working, and enabling digital transformation across the business.

Change typically comes slowly in the insurance business, an industry characterized by traditional ways of working and technology use. Belgian insurer Ethias knew that to remain competitive and provide a better experience for its 1.2 million customers, it must buck this trend and modernize its life, car, and home insurance offerings. In 2019, 100 years after its founding, the insurer embraced digital transformation by launching a 100 percent digital insurance in Belgium, called Flora Insurance. The service relies on chatbots and mobile apps for customer interactions, similar to other digital offerings such as Lemonade, Luko, and Alan. Flora aims to offer customers speed, simplicity, and transparency when purchasing insurance.

Ethias’s long-time IT consulting partner NRB advised it to take a new approach with Flora and build it with a native cloud architecture running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “If you want to really innovate, you have to be radical,” says Fabian Delhaxhe, Digital Transformation and Innovation Consultant at NRB. NRB provided strategy and implementation advice, and ongoing maintenance for the project. “You have to be disruptive before you get disrupted by all of the new entrants coming to the market.” NRB and Ethias chose AWS over other cloud providers for Flora because, “AWS is a great accelerator for innovation,” says Delhaxhe. “AWS is well-documented and makes it easy to deliver solutions quickly and with confidence. You can build solutions without worrying too much about infrastructure, which can slow you down.”

Flora launched in September 2020, within the nine-month project deadline. The team focused on improving customer experience, to make the service attractive in a competitive market. “We realized the consumer wants to be able to subscribe without friction,” says Jessica Lion, Head of Flora at Flora Insurance. “The user experience must be impeccable. And for that, we needed to change our philosophy, our way of seeing things.” Thanks to the AWS Architecture, the Flora team has been able to fulfill this vision. Because the system makes it easy to correct small errors or make minor adjustments, the team can change wording for online forms and streamline the sign-up process so customers don’t become confused and abandon the process. It also makes Flora more willing to try out new ideas, knowing that if they get something wrong, it can be immediately fixed. With this flexibility, Flora has quickly added new features, such as being able to pay with a bank card, as well as a credit card. The feature took only eight weeks to develop and launch, an improvement compared to the typical development timeline. AWS also allows Flora to easily add functionality by integrating with third-party providers.

When Flora launched tenant insurance, for example, it was able to provide tenants with an easy way to determine whether they’re in a flood zone—a difficult but necessary question on the subscription forms. The AWS back-end allowed them to quickly integrate with a third-party provider for geographical data so the customer can instantly see if the housing is in a flood zone by simply entering the address. Likewise, Flora used an independent provider to handle bank payments for recurring and one-off payments from customers’ bank accounts. This saved the team time compared to having to develop the capability themselves.

Customer response since launching Flora has been largely positive. Uptake has been slow but steady. “We are, in the Belgian market, both niche and pioneering,” says Lion. Along with hosting Flora, the AWS Architecture has proved a safe way to test new technologies and features with a smaller audience, to see how a subset of customers respond before rolling it out to Ethias’s full customer base. This is helpful for features that cannot be tested in a production environment, such as taking bank payments or using bank cards. Until Flora carries out a transaction with a particular bank, it doesn’t know if the system works with that institution. With Flora, the team can test a bank payment, and quickly adjust the code if it doesn’t go through the first time. Once it works, it can be rolled out to all customers.

Flora’s culture and use of AWS has also impacted culture at Ethias. In technology this means embracing agile development, sprints, and iterative development. For management style, Ethias is learning from Flora’s flat decision-making structure and embedding teams with both business and tech staff. Ethias credits the success of the Flora launch to a close working relationship with NRB. “It didn’t feel like the traditional, divided customer-supplier relationship,” says Lion, “We were definitely a single team.” “From the beginning of this project, we have focused on working efficiently, learning from each other and customers, and pushing innovation as far as we can,” says NRB’s Delhaxhe. “This worked well, and we’ve built a platform for continued digital transformation across Ethias’s business.”