- Industry : Insurance
- Country : Kuwait
Executive Summary
Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Company (BKIC) diversified its sales channels to offer embedded insurance to its partners using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its existing API product was inefficient and slow, so BKIC worked with AWS Partner Zero&One to build a middleware layer to manage its APIs, resulting in a 66 percent increase in speed and 98 percent reduction in API size. Using API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and AWS Control Tower, BKIC cut costs and improved the performance and efficiency of its embedded insurance platform.
BKIC Looks to Embedded Insurance Market for Diversification and Growth
Bahrain Kuwait Insurance Company
(BKIC) was established in 1975 and is the only company operating
as a national insurance company in both Bahrain and Kuwait with
an A- rating. Having traditionally sold insurance policies
directly to its customers, BKIC wanted to diversify its sales
channels and offer embedded insurance, which allows partners
such as airlines, telecoms, and fintech firms to easily offer
specialist insurance policies to their customers.
BKIC bought a specialized off-the-shelf API product to allow
fast communications between its core insurance platform and its
embedded insurance partners. But it was disappointed with the
performance because the product made inefficient use of
bandwidth and could only process one API at a time. “The
out-of-the box API solution didn’t meet our expectations,” says
Zeyad Zainal, senior manager for digital transformation at BKIC.
“The APIs weren’t up to our standards.”
BKIC’s infrastructure was running from an on-premises data
center and Zainal wanted to find a way to improve the company’s
API solution. He also wanted to make the company’s
infrastructure more flexible and scalable and, after
investigating many different long-term options, he chose to use
AWS because of its diverse range of managed services. BKIC chose
to work with
AWS Partner
Zero&One
and together they built a 3-year digital transformation plan to
better manage its APIs and migrate its critical systems to the
cloud.
Zero&One is a partner that really understands AWS and is able to
quickly transform an idea into a working product or feature. We
have a very good relationship with Zero&One and I can see us
working together with AWS for a long time to come.
Zeyad Zainal
Senior Manager Digital Transformation, BKIC
Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda Unlock Efficiency and Speed
In February 2023, Zero&One started working with BKIC to create a
middleware layer that could handle its API calls more
efficiently. The first problem was that the third-party API
system required all fields of every API to be transmitted for
each API call. The majority of these fields were usually
unchanged, so most of the data being transferred was redundant,
wasting resources. “We wanted Zero&One to find a way so only
changed fields need to be transferred,” says Zainal. “This would
reduce the size of data transmissions, improve performance, and
reduce bandwidth usage.”
Zero&One used
Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to
create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any
scale. This was run using
AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run
code for virtually any type of application or backend service
without provisioning or managing servers. The middleware layer
also uses
AWS Control Tower, which orchestrates multiple AWS services on your behalf while
maintaining the security and compliance needs of your
organization, and
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(Amazon EC2), secure and resizable compute capacity for
virtually any workload.
The new middleware layer was completed in May 2023 and
orchestrates all API interactions. Now only changed fields need
to be transferred, making API calls faster and simpler. The
average time taken to request, process, and respond to an API
fell from 120 milliseconds (ms) to 40 ms, a 66 percent
reduction. The average size of an API fell from 25 KB to 450
B—98 percent smaller. Serverless environments scale easily, so
whereas previously BKIC’s system could only process one API at a
time, it is now capable of processing up to 1,000 APIs every
second. “Using AWS Lambda means we only pay for the resources
that we use,” says Zainal. “Our embedded insurance platform is
now faster, more robust, and scalable because we’re using AWS
and partnering with Zero&One.”
Using Lambda means we only pay for the resources that we use.
Our embedded insurance platform is now faster, more robust, and
scalable because we’re using AWS and partnering with Zero&One.
Zeyad Zainal
Senior Manager Digital Transformation, BKIC
BKIC Eyes AI/ML for Future Efficiencies
Zainal says this project marks the beginning of BKIC’s journey
into the cloud, and over the next 2 years he expects to work
with Zero&One to migrate more infrastructure to AWS. “Zero&One
is a partner that really understands AWS and is able to quickly
transform an idea into a working product or feature,” says
Zainal. “We have a very good relationship with Zero&One and I
can see us working with them and with AWS for a long time to
come.”
The next step for BKIC is to build a data lake and investigate
how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could
improve efficiencies in other areas of the insurance business.
“We want to see if ML and AI can improve our claims management,
underwriting, and risk analysis processes,” says Zainal.
The API project has cemented the relationship between BKIC,
Zero&One, and AWS, with Zainal looking to migrate more core
systems into the cloud, as well as replicating the entire API
middleware layer at their Kuwait-based branch.“We are a working
case study for our branch in Kuwait,”says Zainal. “Because AWS
services can be easily replicated, they can copy our setup and
instantly start experiencing the same benefits we are enjoying.”
