Stroll: Building the Complete Car Insurance Platform

Shifting from Bricks and Mortar to Digital

In 2021, Instil was approached by one of Ireland's largest insurance companies, Prestige Holdings, to develop a new digital brand, Stroll Insurance. With over 50 years experience in the insurance market, Prestige has built a strong local brand renowned for its excellent customer service and approachability.

However, with consumer behaviours changing, even the most respected local firms are finding their market-share being eroded over time. For many the only choice is to face the digital age head-on so as to survive and ultimately thrive.

Our job was to take a traditional bricks and mortar business and overlay an exceptional digital experience. This experience had to make every part of the consumer journey a delight, from quote to renewal. It also had to drive efficiencies in the back-office so that the overall business could provide a brilliant customer experience at every touchpoint.

From Zero to Cloud Native Insurance in 12 Months

One of the key reasons we exist as a company is to build better software faster. Sounds simple, but delivering great software quickly is not easy. It requires complete alignment of people, process and technology working together to be more than the sum of their parts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology is in many ways the easy part, certainly compared to people and process. Once a team is all pointing in the same direction, technology becomes the real enabler - using the right technology in the right context will allow teams to fly.

In this instance, that key technology choice was serverless - a form of cloud engineering that allows teams to focus more on delivering business value and differentiation than on invisible infrastructure. Serverless brings many benefits but as any technology choice, it has its own tradeoffs.

Crucially, serverless is a different way of thinking about and building software systems, one that takes teams time to learn. With serverless, teams have to walk before they can run, but once they make the switch it will be hard to convince them back, such is the step-change in productivity.

Small Team, Big Results

In our case, that step-change meant we were able to deliver a functioning platform into the market in just 12 months. This included a responsive web portal to guide users through the quote process, a mobile application to manage policies and claims, and a backend that integrated with a popular but antiquated quote engine technology that was never designed with the cloud in mind. All of this and more with a team of only 10 people.

As a platform, Stroll has now been up and running for well over a year. During that time the platform has continued to evolve rapidly, with a constant stream of new features and capabilities. Key to it all, has been the decision to embrace cloud native and serverless, which has allowed us to:

• Reduce Delivery Time - Leverage cloud-native services so that focus on delivering business value not infrastructure.
• Reduce Costs - Avoid paying for idle during periods of low activity.
• Reduce Operational Effort Let the cloud provider do all the operational heavy lifting.

Below you will find a few more detailed articles on how we built Stroll using serverless. If you would like to learn more about how cloud native and serverless can accelerate your journey, we would be very happy to advise.