Name: Merixstudio
Address: ul. Małachowskiego 10, Poznań, WP, 61-129, PL
Telephone: +48 570 001 928
Rating: 4.8

# fintech

Business Insurance Management System for the US-based company

backend

Python

Django

PostgreSQL

Celery

CQRS

design

UX Audit

UX Design

UX Consultancy

frontend

React

Redux

Next.js

Cypress

Manual Testing

Automated testing

Mocha

Chai

API testing

tools

Redis

Postman

CI/CD

AWS

Terraform

Docker

Nginx

110+

wireframes

team members at the peak velocity time

hours of time zone difference

This company is a USA-based insurance agency focusing on cooperation with a few specific industries, e.g., trucking. Providing high-quality business products to a narrow and sometimes niche group of enterprises prompted them to adjust their internal processes. Still, off-the-shelf automation tools proved to be too general and rigid to use. Before contacting Merixstudio, the insurance company cooperated with an Indian team of developers to create its internal software tool to support working on files, data, and clients, based on ColdFusion technology.

And although the product was to improve their daily work, it quickly became a blocker for the company to grow. The application was slow, too complicated, many operations had to be done manually, and the technologies used were outdated. And most importantly, the learning curve for both new employees and users was steep and required a lot of onboarding time. The overall user experience of the application was poor.

To ensure the company's further development, they were on the lookout for a trustworthy tech partner who will:

share ownership of the product's design and implementation roadmap,
rewrite the legacy system (both backend and frontend),
revise the way their business processes and operations are reflected in it,
make sure the new tech stack is modern and scalable,
build a long term relationship for maintenance after the project is done.

What's more, the software development company the agency wanted to collaborate with was to demonstrate a proactive approach to setting goals and propose smart solutions to achieve them.

To perfectly understand the client's core business, we started our cooperation with a full product design workshop. Together with the client, who came to meet the team of designers and developers in person, we discussed how the current application works and identified all areas for improvement. The workshop gave us valuable insight into the tiny details of complex processes and let us propose clear-cut UX enhancements.

As the desired workflow was not represented in the original application, one of our main goals was to give the client's app users better control over processes and increase their productivity. The in-depth analysis showed that our work on modernizing the legacy system should start with a total redesign of information architecture. With over 100+ wireframes, prepared by our product design team, we proposed a new approach to displaying and managing the client's policies. Important data that was chaotically scattered throughout the system has been logically linked and displayed in one place. Unnecessary functionalities and data have been removed, and consistency in labeling has been introduced. All these enhancements provided the client with easier access to the most frequently used tools and ensured better visibility of the current statuses in policy-related processes.

Soon after finishing work related to improving the user experience, the full-stack team of experienced engineers started the development. To ensure the scalability of the application, we chose Python for the backend, and React for the frontend. Bearing in mind the further development of the product, we implemented the API first approach and prepared detailed documentation. To lower the amount of technical debt and the possibility of regression, the team of Quality Assurance specialists conducted a set of specific automated tests via automation. To deliver the best results, we composed a self-managed team counting 14 members at peak time, which was managed by a seasoned Agile Project Manager.

Over 9 months of close cooperation resulted in creating a new business insurance management system that removes the identified problems and modernizes the way it works.

policies management

enables users to manage and control processes such as New Business, Endorsement, Renewal and have access to the history of the changes.
communication

thanks to the integration with Gmail API users can easily communicate with clients directly from the system and import their messages from the email box
tasks/reminders

users can easily create reminders, keep them organized, and receive notifications about the upcoming deadline what significantly streamline their everyday work
clients, Business Partners database

users can access and edit the list of key partners such as Insurance Carriers (Appointed Carriers, Surplus Line Brokers) and other companies. All information about each of the companies is available in one place now.
contact list

all key contact information in a well-organized form. Now the user can easily access the insurance carrier contact details.

generation of insurance certificates

users can generate Certificates of Insurance (on demand) based on the underwriting and general policy information
files management

upload files and organize them into categories in a more convenient way. We added an option to filter and sort content to enable users to find what they are looking for quicker. Moreover, the user now can see which policy the document is linked to.
reports

they give the user the possibility to monitor the production. The user can find information about upcoming renewals and statuses of the renewal process
search

searching for clients, files, and messages have never been so easy
administration tools and settings

the admin has a possibility to manage not only users and permissions but also templates and metadata used in the application (categories, labels, etc.)