How esure’s digital transformation enhanced customer experience

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.