Blue Zebra Insurance (BZI) has rebuilt its insurance platform, Blue Leopard, as bigger things await the Sydney-based underwriting agency.
“The reason we recently rebuilt it was to help facilitate what’s called multi-tenancy, or being able to house multiple agencies and insurers in one platform,” revealed Amar Roomi (pictured) when Insurance Business caught up with the BZI chief technology officer.
“At the same time it was to take the learnings that we made over the last three years with the 1.0 version of Blue Leopard, and apply those learnings to this new platform. What we’re hoping to have by the end of the year is to migrate all our existing products to the new platform, as well as onboard a number of agencies to help share in the benefits as well.”
As reported earlier this year, the company now offers its platform as a service (PaaS) to fellow underwriting agencies and insurers who might be keen to benefit from BZI’s technology. Currently two of its peers have already come onboard, with a further two slated to join.
Roomi noted: “The platform side of the business is starting to gain a lot of traction. We’re syndicating the platform to a number of underwriting agencies we’ve got in our sales pipeline at the moment, and we’re hoping to convert another two agencies by the end of the year.”
The Blue Leopard rebuild and the PaaS business, meanwhile, have not stopped BZI from sealing other partnerships. Last month, the agency announced the full launch of its participation on the Steadfast client trading platform (SCTP) for personal lines.
BZI home, motor, and landlord policies became available on the SCTP on July 19, following what was described as “record time” technology integration. The tie-up offers brokers another channel through which to transact business with BZI, in addition to the Zebra Lounge.
“We were able to pull together three products and integrate them into the SCTP in about four months,” highlighted the CTO, who cited the firm’s flexible technology stack. “That probably compares to about 12 to 18 months per product for other insurers.”
It’s no wonder then that things are looking up for BZI.
Roomi told Insurance Business: “We’re pretty excited as a business, because we think the next 12 months are going to be good from a business perspective, both in terms of volume and what we’re hoping to achieve. From a technology perspective, what gets us up at the moment – other than the work that we’ve done on the SCTP – is the work that we’re currently doing on the new platform.”
The tech chief’s camp believes that the improved Blue Leopard will increase BZI’s speed-to-market by another order of magnitude.
“We pride ourselves on being pretty quick at the moment,” said Roomi, “and we think we can be a lot quicker when it comes to product development. That’s the big thing that we’re working on over the next six months – to finalise our transition to the new platform Blue Leopard 2.0 and start to really cash in on the benefits that it provides us with.”
