Forte Insurance Cuts Total Cost of Ownership by 31% and Accelerates Development to Support Regional Growth

Forte Insurance was one of the pioneering insurance companies in Cambodia. While it’s currently the largest general insurer in the country—with approximately 45 percent of the local market—the company is also expanding its business through acquisition and organic growth in neighboring Laos. Forte Insurance provides comprehensive coverage and remains committed to innovation and customer-centricity, continually developing insurance solutions tailored to its customers’ evolving needs.

As more people purchased Forte Insurance products online, the company’s consumer-facing applications required more scalability. Data bottlenecks on servers hosted in a third-party facility affected business functions. Meanwhile, concerns about managing increased data loads slowed product development. Jeremy Ng, group CTO at Forte Insurance, explains, “We needed greater platform flexibility and faster development to continue improving our services.” The company sought to migrate its customer-facing applications and DR environment to a modern cloud platform, then streamline software development through a CI/CD pipeline. “With the cloud, we could dynamically scale our systems to support the next development phase,” Ng says. “It would give us the foundation for more agile, cost-effective, and efficient IT.”

After reviewing the offerings of multiple cloud providers, Forte Insurance chose AWS. “A key factor in our decision was the high-quality support provided directly by AWS, with specialists from AWS headquarters in Singapore and subject matter experts from multiple regions available to assist us in optimizing different areas of our cloud environment,” Ng says.

The company migrated its website and online portal, which customers use to view, update, and manage their policies, to AWS with near-zero downtime. With support from AWS Solutions Architects, Forte Insurance built a cloud-native environment using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to manage the application’s microservices containers. It also integrated AWS workloads with its on-premises Oracle core system using Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.

In addition, Forte Insurance created a highly scalable and secure DR environment for its core systems using services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage, Amazon CloudWatch for application monitoring, and AWS CloudTrail to track user activity. Once the DR solution was completed, the company began developing a data platform using Snowflake on AWS as the cloud data warehouse, alongside a data lake built on Amazon S3. Remembers Ng, “AWS genuinely supported us when we wanted to evaluate Snowflake as our data warehouse. We didn’t feel like we were being pushed towards any particular solution.”

To streamline development, the company created a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline. Developers push their code changes into AWS CodeCommit, which serves as the staging repository. AWS CodeBuild then compiles the code, runs tests, and builds a Docker image. From there, AWS CodeDeploy deploys the code to the staging environment. After additional testing, a release manager application moves the code to a production repository for final deployment.

Since deploying on AWS, Forte Insurance has successfully launched seven new insurance products and achieved approximately 217 percent growth in digitally enabled premiums across both B2C and B2B segments—significantly improving scalability, innovation, and customer experience. The number of software releases has also increased from 4 to 20 per month. Additionally, cost savings in areas such as disaster recovery—where TCO has decreased by around 31 percent—are helping free up resources to further enhance the portfolio. Ng says, “With our CI/CD pipeline on AWS, we’ve reduced average deployment time by 60 percent, increased deployment frequency by 400 percent, and cut rollback time by 80 percent to accelerate our pace of innovation.”

The business has laid a strong technical and governance foundation for continued success in an evolving regulatory market. Ng comments, “Forte Insurance is setting the standards and best practices around security and data privacy for the insurance industry in Cambodia. Using AWS, we can proactively address security and compliance to meet and even exceed local regulatory expectations.”

As the global financial services industry embraces generative AI, Forte Insurance is exploring the integration of the technology with its document management system (DMS), which runs on AWS. As part of a proof of concept, its employees have used a generative AI chatbot powered by Amazon Bedrock to interrogate DMS data to speed up decision-making. The proof of concept not only showed how generative AI on AWS can boost personnel efficiency but also highlighted its value as a strategic tool for the broader business. Ng concludes, “With generative AI on AWS and our modernized infrastructure, we feel well positioned to achieve more than ever in the years ahead.”