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Customer Story

Abacai: Revolutionizing Insurance with an Omnichannel Experience

A digital-first UK car insurer teamed up with Xebia to challenge a traditional industry with cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

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Software Technology

Industry
Finance

Company
Xebia

Founded by former Aviva CEO Mark Wilson, Abacai is a UK-based company on a mission to revolutionize insurance through technology. Combining intimate knowledge of an industry that is very much stuck in the past with a passion for some of the latest innovations in data insights and usage, Abacai’s executives want to do insurance differently.

boom – a digital-channel seller – is Abacai’s first solution aimed at helping users get and manage car insurance effortlessly. Using a wealth of data to provide its customers with the best possible coverage and service, boom has already set new standards for what’s possible with car insurance.
Why
Abacai wanted to disrupt a traditional industry with cutting-edge technology, empowering both the customer and the insurer
What
The insurer needed to develop its first revolutionary solution, boom, within only six months
How
Customers can insure their cars effortlessly with boom while Abacai’s risk is optimally mitigated

A Traditional Industry Stuck in the Past

Getting car insurance in the UK has always been a bore – with so many legal formalities, customers hate the dreaded annual renewal time, negotiating myriad insurance websites, and answering the same questions repeatedly to find the best quote.

Simultaneously, companies offering the lowest prices aren’t always offering the best prices for themselves; the key is calculating risk better than your competitors, meaning you sell the right policies while still making a profit.

Abacai had a vision to disrupt the UK market using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand risk better when generating quotes, while also creating an automated customer experience that surpasses the competition. To keep costs down automation was key – AI would help make smarter policies based on user data, in less time.

A Revolution in Revolutionary Time

Abacai needed a data-driven engine for generating insurance quotes. Bringing in Xebia, the companies worked on an AI-driven solution hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, with full scalability and cost efficiencies. Most car insurance customers use price comparison websites to find their policies – requiring an API response within six seconds – so the engine had to work fast to ensure that boom returned the right responses in time.

There also was another challenge – development time. For business reasons the entire technology stack needed to be developed so the first customer would insure their car with boom within just six months. Add in intelligent chat features and fraud prevention, and the companies had a big challenge on their hands.

It’s been a terrific partnership. I’m happy to say that with the solutions we’ve developed together, Abacai’s technology stack will be in a very good place for a long, long time. Next up – how can AI help us settle claims?
abacai_logo
Chris Payne Chief Technology Officer, Abacai

Car Insurance is Finally Seamless

Working as a single team via DevOps, Abacai and Xebia built a swift, agile engine situated within AWS. The engine collects data points into the data mesh – Snowflake – that are then modeled to assess risk. As such, boom intelligently decides whether or not the company should insure a specific customer.

Using a smooth front-end interface, boom customers can easily get insurance without unnecessary formalities. Chatbot Abi intelligently interprets customer questions, suggesting possible solutions, all of which are available via native mobile apps and the boom website.

After six months the first customer purchased insurance with boom, and within a year over fifty thousand more followed.

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