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esure aimed to tackle widespread dissatisfaction among UK insurance customers with a bold multi-year transformation journey.
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Many UK consumers are dissatisfied with their insurance provider. esure wanted to correct this – and transform its business.
esure is a well-established PE-backed player in the UK personal insurance market and has served home and motor customers since 2000. From day one, esure challenged market norms, offering some of the first online and digital insurance products and services. But in a fast-moving market, esure’s pace of innovation and change had slowed.
With a burst of new energy and commitment, esure challenged itself to transform the insurance market – with an ambition to tackle poor industry practices that have reduced the UK’s customer trust levels to one of the worst in Europe.
esure set out on an ambitious strategy to “fix insurance for good ”, transforming the business to become a leading pure-play scalable digital insurer, and to completely decommission its legacy IT systems. It developed a goal to provide market-leading customer experiences through generative AI (GenAI), other innovative technology and state-of-the-art data solutions, powered by a lean agile operating model.
This required a shift from a 20-year-old legacy system to EIS – a modern-architected, event-based, next-generation platform. This was a complex, high-profile program aimed at revolutionizing the UK personal insurance market, which would become the first technology implementation of its kind in Europe, and the first business-wide transformation of its kind to cover all elements of people, technology, data and processes together.
The ultimate goal of the program was to harness esure’s original challenger energy and transform it into a tech-enabled disruptor that offers innovative customer propositions with a best-in-class, low-cost operating model.
Together, EY teams and the esure team embarked on the journey to “fix insurance for good.”
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EY teams developed a new end-to-end business model based on a pioneering scalable tech platform.
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To truly deliver on esure’s game-changing strategy to “fix insurance for good,” the EY team helped the company design and build an entirely new business, based on a platform that is already integrated to over 30 leading cloud solutions including OpenAI, Braze, Segment, Adyen, and RightIndem. With this platform, esure is servicing over 2 million customers in the UK at present, with ambitious targets to increase market share.
The EY team and esure had a long-standing collaboration following early work to identify rapid solutions to particular pain point areas, and together they quickly established highly skilled and experienced delivery teams called “squads” across the program. The EY team’s roles and responsibilities included program management, service design, full stack developers and testers, cloud and data engineering, Insurance operations professionals, and culture and change management. The initial approach was centered on building strong, capable value streams that could embed agile practices throughout the squads and build a strong culture of success.
“This initiative was one of the most expansive and collaborative undertakings in the EY organization’s history, with more than 150 EY people from 10 different countries offering multi-functional, integrated advisory and delivery support – all working cohesively as one group to help deliver a truly differentiated platform for esure vs. their UK peers,” says Preetham Peddanagari, EY EMEIA Digital Insurance Leader.
Throughout the program the EY team put humans at the center of the design, the delivery and changes. For example, a working group centralized all communications to drive culture and community; support development, knowledge transfer and learning; and promote wellbeing and opportunity on the program.
The EY team focused on instilling consistent ways of working, helping manage information and leading practices; leveraging knowledge from across the EY organization, esure and other partner teams on the program. The EY team built a planning approach that combined a strong balance of significant releases, with smaller, iterative improvements to offer continuous benefit to the business. The teams worked together to design a state-of-the-art future-proof operating model for the digitally enabled insurer, building on esure’s digital-first strategy and vision. That model provided a tangible view of the design and capabilities of the post-transformation business and how esure would provide improved customer outcomes at a lower unit cost.
The EY team and esure built a brand-new environment powered by EIS, using best-of-breed cutting-edge technologies. This established esure as the first scaled UK player to truly enter the platform age with a full-stack, cloud-native platform, with GenAI solutions rapidly embedded and deployed throughout the business and customer-service journey.
“This platform enabled us to take a new approach to pricing, with data scientists building machine learning models to provide fairer, more accurate pricing for all our customers,” says Peter Martin-Simon, esure’s Chief Customer Officer. esure was also able to create a state-of-the art claims platform integrated into an insurance ecosystem comprising suppliers, repairers, regulators, and others, and offer customers an integrated digital claims solution.
As part of the program, the esure and EY team migrated 1.8m existing policies and 248,000 claims from the legacy platform to the new business solution, adopting the market’s first ever mid-term migration approach.
“The advanced migration capability offers substantial opportunities by helping enable seamless integration onto the new technology platform,” explains Peddanagari. This reusable solution provides a significant advantage in terms of speed and flexibility; esure were able to migrate their home insurance customer base swiftly over a seven-week period – which would usually take over a year using a conventional market approach. This helped esure to fully exit and decommission its legacy IT estate within months of completing the migration, achieving the goal of becoming the UK’s first scaled, cloud-only digital insurer.
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The new model and platform enable unprecedented analytics and speed of responding to claims.
esure has deployed a scaled use of state-of-the-art GenAI, alongside strong data science capability, automated indemnity controls and market-leading fraud and analytics capabilities to drive a real-time trading approach and help enable not only a deeper understanding of customers, but also a significant reduction in indemnity spend.
“We are capturing data on every second that the customer is in our customer journey, which helps us rapidly develop propositions that are designed around them. We are changing pricing on a near-daily basis as well,” says Martin-Simon.
The program has not only created a new business, but an entirely new paradigm in customer experience, featuring seamless and intuitive digital journeys. Today, 78% of policy updates can be fully self-served online and 90% of all claim types can be initiated online, and these numbers will continue to grow as more journeys are built and optimized.
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esure has quickly built on the game-changing platform capabilities and is now one of the most advanced adopters of GenAI solutions in the market, with the unique ability to deploy multiple GenAI and machine learning use cases at speed. “Our innovative use of GenAI means we’ve fully integrated our customer support channels in our online portal, combining chatbot, live chat and voice in one place,” says esure CEO David McMillan. “So if a customer needs to switch channels – moving from live chat to speaking to a colleague on the phone – all of the customer’s request and history is retained in-journey, removing friction and making it simpler to quickly resolve customer requests.”
esure is now able to manage complex claims on a straight through, digital-only basis. Vehicle “write-off” claims, which traditionally take the industry between two and four weeks to process, can now be notified, assessed and paid in just four hours, end to end, meaning the customer has the certainty and cash they need to purchase a replacement car almost immediately.
The transformation has made a big impact on the business, materially reducing unit cost per policy. This lower-cost model enables esure to set fairer, more accurate prices for every customer. And by using machine learning to identify fraud, esure is saving £2m annually. The program has also transformed the working experience for employees, through automation of previously manual processes.
Overall, the program has not only provided a significant transformation within esure and in the UK insurance market, it has also set up esure’s business to drive continuous change with a highly scalable model, bringing long-term value in a highly competitive marketplace.
“By eradicating customer frustrations, fueled by smart use of data, rapid customer testing and our flexible tech platform, we’re confident we can fix today’s broken sector and deliver the insurance that customers expect and value,” says McMillan.
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