According to Forrester, companies are now under pressure to produce significant new products and services quickly but at a lower cost. They often rely on new and innovative software to get them there. Low code platforms are a popular option for insurers to deploy underwriting solutions, claims applications, and broker portals. However; choosing a low code platform that meets the long-term needs of insurers can be challenging.

Choosing a Low Code Platform

Low Code Platforms offers enterprises the opportunity to bring new products and solutions to the marketplace faster and at a lower cost. Low code platform provides a foundation or scaffolding to create a complete software application through the use of configuration and drag and drop interfaces rather than traditional software programming. Since the infrastructure and building blocks are already pre-built, it tremendously speeds the application development process.

But traditionally low code platforms always have over-promised and under-delivered. Low-code platforms have aimed for the moon but have not been able to be used to build anything but simple applications.

Enterprise applications, on the other hand, require:

• Complex business logic.
• The ability for end users to choose/customize master data, configuration, workflow, reporting, etc.
• Ability to create/consume API’s.
• Ability to store/retrieve data, view screens based on access rights.
• Ability to store audit information.
• Strong encryption and data storage capabilities.
• Ability to scale.
• Ability to deploy to multiple environments, maintain multiple versions, etc.
• Ability to integrate data with ERP’s, CRM’s, and other custom applications.
• Single-Sign-on with internal/external applications.

A low-code platform should enable developers to create more with less and manage the build-test-deploy-manage life cycle with minimal effort.

10 Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Low Code Platform

When choosing a low code platform, below are 10 questions that you should ask:

1. What’s the end URL going to be?” In other words, will it be the URL of the Vendor, or will it be my company URL?
2. How do I manage different versions of my code?
3. Do I get multiple environments? (Dev/Test/Production). If yes, how do I deploy different artifacts from one environment to another?
4. How will my end application manage Users? Will they be able to use single-sign-on mechanisms?
5. How do I integrate with applications that do not provide API’s?
6. How do I scale my application?
7. What if there is some missing feature? How do I extend it?
8. Does the low code platform have all the microservices required to build applications?
9. Does the Vendor have expertise in helping with bringing the solution to the market?
10. What is the most complex application built on this platform?

Cloud Nativity, Security, and Scalability

When choosing a low code platform, your focus should go beyond the ability to build applications quickly, but also provide the necessary infrastructure to host it, scale it, and manage it securely.

Insurance companies have numerous regulatory and compliance requirements. To engage an external vendor would mean dealing with the security teams of these companies. They have 100’s of questions on security policy, information architecture, guidelines, and more that need to be satisfied before bringing on a new software vendor.

Imagine having a secure platform that already addresses these 10 questions, is SSAE18 audited, does periodic vulnerability assessments, penetration tests, etc. You can then respond to your company’s security teams with full confidence and get through to building applications rapidly.

Building Applications in the Real World

Let us divide the enterprise IT development requirements into 3 broad categories: Infrastructure, Build, and Deploy, and see how a world-class low-code platform can help you build applications quickly.

Infrastructure Needs

• Wide variety of SQL and No-SQL Databases
• Communication Protocols like FTP, AS2, REST, SOAP
• Data formats used in the insurance industry such as JSON, ACORD XML, XBRL
• Servers with the ability to scale up or down based on demand
• Strong Security, Encryption, Audit, etc.
• High Availability, Redundancy, Failover, Disaster Recovery, Multiple Geography

Build Requirements

• Create customized, complex, responsive world-class UI
• Create workflow, API’s, consume API’s, etc.
• Integrate with different types of applications
• Read/Write to different types of SQL and NO-SQL databases
• Complex rules, rule validity, versioning
• Create Reports
• User Management, Single Sign-on
• Scheduled jobs, batch jobs
• Ease of debugging, logging

Essential features to Deploy an Application

• Host code running on servers on external low code platform, but use your own company-specific URL
• Single click deployment of different artifacts from one environment to another

Eat your own dog food

When Microsoft was building Windows NT in the early 90’s, internally, the entire team was forced to use the early versions of Windows NT, popularizing the term “Eat your own dog food.”

At mondCloud, we decided to put our own Low-code platform to the test, by internally building a complex real-world Insurance product using our platform.  The platform build team and the team building Insurance product worked closely together and a word class Insurance product “Tarmika” was launched in less than 6 months using the mondCloud low-code platform. Tarmika uses all modules of mondCloud: Integration, Complex Responsive User Interface, Workflow, Robotics Process Automation, consuming API’s, creating API’s, reports, etc.

mondCloud has successfully delivered beautiful world-class secure and scalable applications on the cloud that digital power transformation for leading enterprises. Complex applications have been developed on the platform including www.tarmika.com.