
Manuela Züger
Senior Consultant
Helvetia wants to be close to the customer. Thanks to modern technologies like Kafka, this is made possible.
Customers' needs change quickly, and nowadays 24/7 availability is increasingly required. But how can this fast pace be met? Kafka is a message streaming technology that guarantees fail-safety and a rapid data transmission speed. Helvetia Versicherungen and ipt are jointly driving the use of Kafka and other state-of-the-art technologies. This gives us valuable tools to offer customers appealing, simple and fast processes.
The technologies and processes that were able to meet all needs 10 years ago can no longer keep up with the accelerated developments in the market today. We need to upgrade in order to be able to continue to offer the optimal customer experience in the future.
These are the top three challenges Helvetia was confronted with:
Customers today expect fast and stable web applications that are available 24/7. Helvetia wants to offer this to keep customer satisfaction high.
Customers want to be able to interact with Helvetia via various channels. To do this, the data in various applications should be available at all times and should also always be up to date. This requires a decoupling of core systems, which themselves are not (yet) highly available.
Long development cycles slow down innovation and make it difficult to respond promptly to customer needs. Helvetia strives for a short time to market in order to be able to place new products and applications in line with the market. On the technical side, this requires high agility and faster implementation processes.
To overcome these challenges, ipt worked with Helvetia to introduce Kafka as a message streaming platform and make it easily accessible to various teams of developers through simple GitOps processes.
Approaches such as reactive programming, micro-services and Kafka as a message streaming platform make stable and high-performance applications possible.
Thanks to Change Data Capture, data can be transferred from core systems to the Kafka platform, making it available within the organization in real time. Customers can access their data in real time through various channels. For example, real-time analytics are now possible through the use of these technologies.
To be able to react faster to the market, Helvetia relies on the DevOps approach. The teams work in a more agile way and take responsibility across the entire supply chain. Using a new self-service, developers can quickly and easily build new integrations with Kafka.
The following could be achieved with the solution.
The following is required from a technological point of view
The following was used
Helvetia is a leading Swiss insurance group with more than 7 million customers. True to its motto «simple. clear. helvetia.», Helvetia is committed to making the world of insurance easily accessible. From an IT perspective, this means providing agile, innovative and customer-centric solutions. ipt is happy to provide support in this regard, including the introduction of state-of-the-art technologies.