Leading Insurance Company Adopts Low-Code from Mendix to Accelerate Digital Transformation
- Dutch insurer VGA provides customers with unified claims portal and 24/7 insight into claim status via low-code-built solution
- Portal built on Mendix platform improves customer satisfaction by making claims process transparent and streamlines operations by consolidating multiple processes into one application
BOSTON, Aug. 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in low-code application development for the enterprise, today announced that VGA, the Dutch insurance company owned by the municipality of Amsterdam, has leveraged the Mendix low-code platform to create 'VGA Schadeportaal,' a digital portal for damage claims.
The newly built digital portal enables VGA to work closely with its customers in one environment where claims are both reported and processed. The new solution not only enables VGA to speed up the process and improve efficiency but also provides customers with 24/7 insight into the status of their claim. And thanks to the flexibility of Mendix low-code technology, VGA can easily add new functionality based on the needs of its customers, essentially creating a future-proof solution.
VGA's new digital portal built with low-code from Mendix underscores the fact that leading insurers are increasingly turning to faster and more collaborative visual software development platforms in order to build apps that delight customers and help them to gain business advantage.
The primary task of VGA is to provide insurance to the municipality of Amsterdam and companies and institutions associated with it, such as the water and port authority and the municipal transport company. VGA also offers collective insurance to municipal officials and their families. And VGA acts as a broker, for example, for construction insurance.
The need for a new damage registration system at VGA was driven by the increasing demands of its customers. "In the event of damage, good and fast communication during the claims handling process is essential," explains Egon Jacobs, director at VGA and responsible for the claims department. "Our previous system only let customers register damages. However, they wanted to be in charge of the damage process and have more insight into the status of the claim.
Low-code offers flexible and cost-efficient environment
VGA first looked at standard applications, but quickly discovered that integration between these applications and the base system was a bottleneck. And like any insurer, VGA must meet the requirements of the supervising authority, so compliance plays an important role. "The consultancy firm that guided us in the process, BCE Consulting, pointed us to the possibility of developing a solution ourselves using a low-code platform. We never even heard of low-code, but soon learned that it could offer us an extremely flexible and cost-efficient environment," Jacobs says.
Low-code with Mendix is a visual, model-based platform that abstracts and automates the software development process, replacing arcane code with a visual, drag-and-drop paradigm that enables application "makers" of every skill level — including non-technical business experts — to actively participate in the development process. This collaborative posture accelerates the development cycle by a factor of 10 or more, and results in solutions that effectively solve business challenges the first time.
"We ultimately choose to work with Mendix partner Bizzomate," Jacobs states. "They clearly demonstrated that they have a great deal of knowledge and experience in the insurance industry, and were able to provide us with tailored advice. We felt the Mendix technology would cater to our needs best in terms of flexibility and facilitating collaboration between the developers and our product owner. We learned that Mendix is also the go-to low-code platform for the municipality of Amsterdam. Hearing their experiences was an extra validation of our decision."
Bizzomate leveraged a range of Mendix capabilities in developing the VGA solution, among them sophisticated collaborative functionality; the availability of numerous pre-built widgets; and a process that is tremendously faster than traditional methodologies.
According to Sjonny Calis, claims handler at VGA and product owner of the portal, "Thanks to the Mendix platform, we have an extremely flexible solution we can use to continuously optimize our processes and communication with our customers."
Management information about efficiency in claims process
VGA and its customers now work together in one unified portal. The customer logs in to the portal and sees everything that is happening with their claim, including all email correspondence.
"Our requirements were extensive, but Mendix and Bizzomate were able to deliver what VGA and our customers needed," says Jacobs. "VGA Schadeportaal makes the process of reporting damage and handling claims consistent and provides us with management information, for example, about our own efficiency in the claims process and the possibility to effectively manage workloads. This was something we didn't have before. But, and this is even more important, we now can provide more valuable information to our customers 24/7 as well."
"This is a giant leap from where we were and helps us tremendously in optimizing customer satisfaction. The new portal, based on low-code technology, has made us future-proof and provides us with the ability to further streamline the process of reporting damage and handling claims," concludes Jacobs.
Marc Gelissen, founder at Bizzomate, says: "With the VGA Schadeportaal, the organization is at the forefront of innovation in the insurance industry. It took some guts to take on this project as a relatively small organization, but in the end it has proven very fruitful, and serves as an example for other insurance companies looking to improve their process of reporting damage and handling claims."
Background
In a pandemic-disrupted world, software is the new lifeblood of our daily lives and the connective tissue holding together the global economy. However, traditional software development takes far too long and very often fails to deliver the results business needs and users love. Even prior to COVID-19 there were simply not enough professional software developers in the world to build all the software currently required. The global pandemic has accelerated and exacerbated what was already a software and business crisis. Enter low-code software development. Low-code from Mendix is a powerful enterprise-grade visual development approach empowering citizen and professional developers to make cloud-native applications more than 10X faster for web and mobile using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic – all through an intuitive graphical user interface.
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About Mendix
Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code, is fundamentally reinventing the way applications are built in the digital enterprise. With the Mendix platform, enterprises can 'Make with More,' by broadening an enterprise's development capability to conquer the software development bottleneck; 'Make it Smart,' by making apps with rich native experiences that are intelligent, proactive, and contextual; and 'Make at Scale,' to modernize core systems and build large app portfolios to keep pace with business growth. The Mendix platform is built to promote intense collaboration between business and IT teams and dramatically accelerate application development cycles, while maintaining the highest standards of security, quality, and governance — in short, to help enterprises confidently leap into their digital futures. Mendix's 'Go Make It' platform has been adopted by more than 4,000 leading companies around the world.
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