Smart Contract Solution for Vehicle Insurance

Business challenge

We started work with a breakthrough blockchain startup who had a specific request for a smart contract solution from its biggest customer. The end client was one of the oldest and largest insurance companies in Europe who also was an active member of the International Cooperative and Mutual Insurance Federation (ICMIF). The company employs about 15,000 professionals across Europe and holds leading positions in the Dutch insurance market.

This end client delivers mainly health, non-life, and income protection insurance products. Although the company’s roots date back to the early nineteenth century, their striving for continuous innovation makes them a competitive player in the modern digital insurance market.

As a recognized InsurTech enabler, the company is pushing innovation at every possible level, moving outside traditional insurance and prevention services and offering disruptive blockchain technology solutions and IoT-powered web and mobile solutions.

The end client recently joined the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative (B3I), whose key mission is to transform the insurance sector and make insurance more affordable and accessible for consumers. With a Blockchain-powered ecosystem at the heart of this collaborative effort, B3I members want to assess the potential of distributed ledger technologies.

Exploring the blockchain as a way to prevent insurance fraud and maximize durability and resistance to attack, the end client launched a pilot project in partnership with a Swiss blockchain startup who was our direct client. This Swiss partner delivers a suite of highly scalable smart contract solutions including a language for defining contract specifications and an operating system for managing and storing smart contracts.

The end client wanted a prototype web app that would enable online vehicle insurance policy purchases. Each stage in the process, from selecting an insurance plan to paying for it, would be stored, updated, and validated on the blockchain. Working alongside the end client and our Swiss partner, Intellias, a reliable insurance software development company, played the role of core frontend design and development provider.

Technology solution

The end client presented a comprehensive portfolio of requirements, mockups, and use cases at the initiation phase. Their original vision was to use pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as the foundation. Our dedicated team, however, brought this topic up for rigorous discussion, and after a series of pro and con workshops we reached a mutual consensus.

We agreed to use AngularDart, a rarely used Google-maintained web app framework that, along with performance and productivity, offers ample opportunities for reuse. In particular, when combined with Flutter, it allows us to convert web apps into release-ready mobile apps for both Android and iOS with minimum cost and effort. Although AngularDart experts were almost impossible to find on the market, two of our Ruby on Rails engineers possessed enough Dart expertise for the project to move forward.

Another matter that Intellias raised was improvements to the user experience and product interface. Our UI/UX design office analyzed and significantly re-worked the raw prototypes provided by our client. Special attention was paid to the end client’s brand integrity, and the UI design followed strict branding requirements across pages.

With the technology stack and UX/UI design agreed upon, Intellias engineers moved on to an intensive development phase. We implemented logic for user registration and onboarding, dashboards for viewing insurance history and product details, and insurance and claim request features. There were a few challenges along the way.

The first was related to the novelty of the AngularDart technology. Our engineers performed R&D activities to resolve issues blocking our feature implementation plan. The second challenge was due to the absence of working contract APIs from the end client, who only provided a confirmed API specification. Our team wiggled out of this situation by incorporating mock objects into both services logic and our functional tests to mimic the behavior of a non-existent API. This workaround allowed us to guarantee zero problems for the client when integrating our frontend with their blockchain middleware.

Business impact

In less than two months, our Intellias team has delivered a fully functional web app frontend prototype, exceeding the end client’s initial expectations. The prototype will be integrated with the blockchain-powered middleware developed by our Swiss partner’s team. Once completed, we expect a major product demo to engage the end client’s top management and potential customers. If the demo goes well, Intellias will be offered an extended product development agreement for a number of blockchain-based InsurTech solutions.

Intellias’ dedicated team services have brought these benefits to the end client:

• Access to our 1,000 in-house engineers and 70,000 engineers on the Ukrainian talent market
• Easy administration with all contracts, payroll operations, team setup, and more covered by Intellias
• Great infrastructure with modern office buildings that promote creative and inspiring work
• Delivery management including team productivity metrics and product quality monitoring
• Consulting services to identify weak points and establish an Agile transformation action plan
• Talent management to help transfer product knowledge and align remote teams with the end client’s in-house team