Fast-growing Thinksurance is changing the insurance landscape, offering a disruptive platform to help connect B2B insurance distributors, their technology providers, and insurers. AWS, alongside AWS Advanced Consulting Partner The Scale Factory, has helped Thinksurance find the scalability, security, and manageability it needs to continue its meteoric international rise.
Thinksurance Lays the Foundations for New Growth with The Scale Factory and AWS
Founded in 2015, Thinksurance is one of Europe’s fast-growing superstars. The company’s B2B insurance platform is disrupting the traditional world of commercial insurance.
Thinksurance acts as the digital middle layer between insurance companies—such as Zurich and Allianz—and the banks, brokers, agencies, and distributors that sell insurance products to small and medium-sized businesses and major corporate clients.
The innovative platform uses data analytics and artificial intelligence to cover the full B2B insurance consultation journey—from customer needs and risk assessment to contract closing and policy issuance.
From On-Premises to the Cloud
To unlock future growth and take the next step on its journey, Thinksurance needed to build a new microservices architecture to pave the way for a pending product launch and further international expansion.
“Our previous on-premises dedicated server had room for improvement,” says Vasil Vasilev, chief technology officer at Thinksurance. “We wanted to increase performance and speed. Moreover, we wanted to overcome the limitations of our legacy systems. But most importantly, the on- premises server wasn’t scalable.”
Making those changes meant that Thinksurance needed to solidify its security and compliance and modernize its development processes.
In particular, the company wanted to reinvent its agile development processes and reduce the time required to onboard new developers. Faster, smoother onboarding would give it the agility needed to get new product updates to market faster and keep pace with customer demands.
The Need for Scalability and Security
With all of these goals in mind, Thinksurance began the migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“AWS is aligned to our business outlook,” says Vasilev. “It offers the scalable, secure, high-performing infrastructure we need.”
But the company needed an expert partner to ensure that it followed best practices and could build the flexible, scalable platform it required. Vasilev and the Thinksurance team sought help from technical agency The Scale Factory, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. Together, Thinksurance and The Scale Factory set about assessing Thinksurance’s AWS migration plans, with a particular focus on security and data sovereignty.
“We have a large analytics department at Thinksurance,” says Timm Weitzel, chief information officer and chief financial officer at Thinksurance. “So where our data is stored—and in which country—matters to our partners and to us. In addition, we process hundreds of terabytes of data, so analytics performance is really important to Thinksurance.”
The Scale Factory implemented its AWS Control Tower for SaaS solution to help Thinksurance securely manage its AWS accounts and meet the standards of the AWS Well-Architected Framework without the need for in-house AWS expertise.
Onboarding Developers Quickly and Transparently
Thinksurance now employs more than 140 people — 40 percent of them are in-house developers and data experts — and also works with multiple freelance developers.
With so many internal user accounts to manage, The Scale Factory made full use of AWS Control Tower, which sits at the heart of the new platform. The multi-account management technology helps Thinksurance provision new developer accounts quickly and easily, reducing the time to onboard new developers and speeding up product development.
“Onboarding time for new developers has been slashed from days to hours,” says Vasilev. “This is a game-changer for us. It is now faster and easier for developers to make changes to products, meaning we can get new features and updates out to our clients faster than ever.”
A security dashboard and centralized logging bring a new level of security visibility to Thinksurance.
“AWS helps us be secure and flexible with our freelance contractors,” says Vasilev. “AWS Control Tower gives us the ability to closely control who has access to our backend systems, giving us traceability, transparency, and accountability across the development team.”
AWS Control Tower also boosts security, giving Thinksurance a single comprehensive security dashboard for tighter event monitoring. Thanks to this, Thinksurance is now building on AWS with confidence.
What’s more, the new AWS-based platform has helped Thinksurance optimize its analytics performance.
“AWS and The Scale Factory have helped us change the way we use our Hadoop analytics cluster, reducing the effort and time needed,” says Weitzel. “It has saved us six months of work.”
A Platform for Future Growth
Weitzel is confident that AWS and The Scale Factory have helped set up Thinksurance for future expansion and growth.
What Thinksurance said...
Working with The Scale Factory, we now have the scalability we need to grow at the pace we want
We have a multi-country, multi-language solution that will help us grow in our home market of Germany, plus expand into other European markets and the US market very soon.
