OutSystems, provider of the number one low-code application development platform announced that BIMA is using the OutSystems low-code platform to build customer engagement web and mobile apps for its new direct-to-consumer life and health insurance products.
The simple and affordable products, BIMA Health and BIMA Life, will go live in January 2020 – initially in Pakistan where BIMA already has three million customers. BIMA plans to roll-out the new products to eight other countries and up to six million customers through 2020.
BIMA—ranked #10 in the Post InsurTech 100 firms—uses mobile technology to disrupt the global insurance and healthcare industries and fuel inclusion. In its nine-year history, it has used mobile technology to bring vital health and insurance products to 31 million customers in emerging markets, making BIMA the leading provider of mobile-delivered insurance and health products in nine countries.
Partnerships with mobile phone network operators have enabled BIMA to develop innovative microinsurance products that provide health and life coverage for low-income families – 75 percent of whom are accessing insurance for the first time and 93 percent of whom survive on less than $10 per day.
Allianz’s digital-focused investment arm, Allianz X, invested $96 million in the startup in 2017. The next phase of BIMA’s growth involves the launch of the new direct-to-consumer products – BIMA Life and BIMA Health.
The partnership with OutSystems enables BIMA to rapidly build, deploy, and scale the customer engagement web and mobile applications needed to give millions of customers access to these services.
“Several factors led us to use OutSystems to build our new BIMA Life and BIMA Health customer engagement apps,” said Stephen Lovell, BIMA’s chief product and technology officer. “These factors include, faster speed to market, support for an iterative development approach, and the need for brilliant user experiences. OutSystems gave us the most reassurance in terms of the completeness of product, scalability, support, and access to partner development talent.”
“We’re excited to be working with BIMA because of their Insurtech pedigree, and especially as improving access to health services and life coverage for families in the emerging markets is such a worthwhile cause,” said Garry Larner, regional director, financial services and insurance at OutSystems.
Integration and reuse were also essential considerations for BIMA when selecting their low-code platform, Lovell explains.
“Our core insurance platform is entirely bespoke, and with OutSystems, we’re able to wrap that with an agile services layer, making it much faster and adaptable to build whatever web and mobile applications we need to serve customers. Moreover, because we’re deploying into so many countries, there are 21 payment platforms that we need to integrate. With OutSystems, we can build these integrations once, then reuse time-and-again, which will help the team spend more time on delivering brilliant user experiences, and less time on backend integrations.”
In addition to customer-facing mobile apps, BIMA will use OutSystems to develop a mobile sales app for field agents, and a web-based doctors’ portal. BIMA Health customers will be able to access doctor consultations and other mobile health services from the new BIMA mobile app.