Headquartered in Houston, Texas, privately held Tokio Marine HCC is an international specialty insurance group writing more than $7 billion in gross written premiums annually across fifteen different lines of coverage and more than 100 classes of specialty insurance that serve everyone from individuals and businesses to governments and nonprofits.
Tokio Marine HCC – Public Risk Group (PRG) is a member of the Tokio Marine HCC group of companies and is a leading provider of comprehensive and cost-effective insurance programs exclusively to public entities.
Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, Tokio Marine HCC – PRG serves towns, townships, villages, cities, counties and special districts of all types.
When it became clear the business’s 20-year-old legacy platform could not meet the needs of its growing business, Tokio Marine HCC – PRG found a way forward with Unqork’s codeless platform.
I. The challenge
A 20-year-old platform and a shortage of tech talent
Tokio Marine HCC – PRG needed to scale its extremely complex business on a platform that was nearly 20 years old and included around 100 integration points across fifteen systems and third-party sources. This made it hard to deliver the fast, streamlined experiences that both customers and brokers increasingly expected.
Updating their legacy platform was a slow and time-consuming process, lacking necessary platform-embedded security controls. As a result, each update increased the company’s security concerns due to the creation of legacy code that could contain potential vulnerabilities.
“The platform was definitely constraining our business growth,” says John Zissu, Vice President of Technology, Tokio Marine HCC – Public Risk Group.
II. The solution
Accelerate development, support complex processes, and up-level available talent
Tokio Marine HCC – PRG’s leadership recognized that finding the right new platform was mission-critical, and they engaged in an exhaustive search that started with the evaluation of 30 vendors.
“The search was a very involved effort, involving multiple groups across the organization who needed to weigh in on requirements and provide feedback around the solutioning,” says Zissu.
"We could see how much faster we could configure changes in Unqork than our legacy app."
—John Zissu, VP of Technology, Tokio Marine HCC
Nor did the company limit itself to low-code/no-code tools during the discovery process, according to Zissu. They focused only on the business problems they wanted to solve and were open to any technology that could help them meet their objectives.
After a deep dive into fifteen of the original 30 vendors, Zissu and his team narrowed the search to three top contenders. They asked the contenders to take on one of Tokio Marine HCC – PRG’s most complex use cases and deliver as much of these capabilities as they could in a week’s time—and only using configurations, with no net-new code.
“Unqork’s platform passed the test with flying colors,” says Zissu.
The initial proof of concept scope was for a submission intake, prioritization, and routing solution. However, after exploring all of the capabilities of Unqork's codeless architecture, Tokio Marine HCC – PRG expanded the initiative to encompass a full, end-to-end broker portal and underwriting workbench.
While Unqork demonstrated the speed at which Tokio Marine HCC – PRG could move, the deciding factor came down to the fact that Unqork supported complex use cases and offered the greatest flexibility in meeting the wide scope of Tokio Marine HCC’s needs. “The configuration interface was intuitive and provided greater ease-of-use relative to some of the competing systems,” adds Zissu.
In addition, Unqork’s codeless platform is entirely drag-and-drop and requires zero coding and no new language to learn. As a result, green IT talent can start doing basic tasks in a matter of weeks. Talent with a few years of experience are able to quickly tackle complex tasks using Unqork. And talent with five or more years of experience can take on the work of an advanced software architect.
“Given all these factors, we could see how much faster we could configure changes in Unqork than in our legacy app,” says Zissu.
III. The outcome
A codeless platform for growth
Since adopting the Unqork platform, Tokio Marine HCC – PRG has been impressed with what it has helped the business accomplish. “What Unqork enabled us to do in such a short time was extremely impressive,” explains Zissu.
"We're already taking advantage of the functionality in the new modern architecture Unqork provides to expand into new products and programs."
—John Zissu, VP of Technology, Tokio Marine HCC
Critically, the platform is not just increasing operational efficiencies; it is also driving growth.
“We're already taking advantage of the functionality in the new modern architecture Unqork provides to expand into new products and programs,” says Zissu. “We expect to continue improving our business results as the system matures and adding value by providing new features for our customers.”
