The Challenge
In 2021, Instil was selected by one of Ireland's largest insurance companies to develop their new online platform, Stroll.
Successfully operating for over 50 years in the traditional bricks and mortar space, the company's success was built on long-lasting customer relationships. Traditionally, brand loyalty has been hugely important in the Irish marketplace, but with consumer behaviour changing rapidly, the group recognised the need to create a compelling digital-first offering.
The Solution
Initially targeting the auto-insurance market, we were tasked with having the initial version of Stroll up and running in just 12 months. That is, we had to design and develop a compelling front-end product (on both web & mobile) and a secure, scalable backend platform with a small team of 10 people in short order.
We did this by choosing a technology stack that allowed us to move quickly, scale with ease and run the platform with minimal operational oversight. That stack was AWS cloud-native + serverless solution consisting of:
- Lambdas to handle business logic execution
- AWS Step Functions to manage generation of insurance quotes
- CDK and CloudFormation to provision infrastructure
- AWS AppSync to rapidly generate API endpoints
- S3 and SQS to manage workflow for creating insurance documentation
- AWS Cognito to manage authentication and account management
- AWS CloudWatch for automated monitoring and alerting
The Benefits
Stroll has now been up and running for over a year. In that time, the platform has continued to evolve to cover new functionality such as renewals and policy documentation (100% digitised and online), and also support for multiple new lines of business. This has been enabled by the key decision of going serverless, which has allowed us to:
- Reduce Time to Market - Leveraging cloud-native services to focus on delivering value not infrastructure.
- Reduce Cost - Not paying for idle during low activity.
- Reduce Operational Effort AWS does all the heavy lifting.