NOVUM
Clutter-Free Software Solutions for Insurances

Creating value for customers in today’s increasingly dynamic insurance industry is one of the highest priorities for insurance companies across the globe. The advent of technologies like cloud computing has become a decisive factor in modernizing businesses. One of the major challenges faced by the insurance industry is the phase of low-interest rates that has lasted for years. In the past, insurance companies were able to report adequate earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) despite a negative underwriting result, thanks to the positive returns in the capital market at the time. These “golden” times are not only over, but the industry is also facing completely new challenges. “When we look into the compliance of companies, for example, the GDPR norms or Solvency II had special regulations for insurance agents and insurance firms. These companies came to us for new business models. They wanted to create new value and we started to develop our Compliance-as-Business-Code cloud platform in 2015,” asserts Achim Heidebrecht, CTO of NOVUM. Over 25 years of experience in developing and implementing core applications for the insurance and finance space, NOVUM with its V’ger Sky applications enables enterprises to run clutter-free software testing on new products in the market.

Heidebrecht mentions that big players in the insurance industry are investing millions in IT and digital projects. Therefore, to cope with the ever-changing dynamics of this sector, NOVUM’s cloud platform that is built on AWS operates worldwide and facilitates agile projects by minimizing the gap between development and operation. An AWS account is generated as per the requirements of customers without any multi-tenant concept, which prioritizes security and compliance requirements in the insurance industry. Access to the V’gerSky Service is secured with multi-factor authentication (MFA). A customer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities such as server time and network storage automatically without any manual interaction with each service provider by using the service account ecosystem of the NOVUM cloud platform.

The NOVUM platform ensures the highest level of confidentiality, assuring end-to-end security of data with high availability and resilience capabilities

Also, the encryption of connections including data and metadata with a sophisticated key management system is a vital feature of NOVUM.

Moreover, the cost-effectiveness of the platform, which is reflected in the complete automation of all IT processes in an economically degressive pricing model is highly valuable to businesses. “We have changed our approach toward the market and tried to contact people who were looking for new business models. The customer has the flexibility to unsubscribe anytime. We are not only a cloud provider but also a technical managed general agency (MGA),” says Heidebrecht. The NOVUM platform ensures the highest level of confidentiality, assuring end-to-end security of data with high availability and resilience capabilities. The entire deployment procedure and operation of applications are ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified.

To cite one instance, MunichRe started a project in June 2017 called Next Business Model. The project included primary insurers, MunichRe and InsurTech startup agent (GetSafe), and a third-party claims admin. NOVUM came into the picture in order to provide a multi-line contract for the customer across all lines of business. Here, NOVUM’s role developed from an ISV/cloud provider to a technical MGA. In November 2017 the project was put into production and manages several thousand contracts as of today.

Additionally, by using NOVUM’s toolkit, many renowned insurance and software companies were able to overcome their predicaments and attained success. Furthermore, small and medium-sized businesses can obtain the toolkit as a cloud service in the future. “We are also looking forward to integrating big data, IoT, and blockchain capabilities to our encrypted and sealed Compliance-as- Business-Code architecture of our platform in order to make it more robust and efficient,” concludes Heidebrecht.