Today’s consumers have fundamentally reshaped how insurance products are developed and delivered. Digital natives expect the same frictionless experiences they enjoy from consumer tech when shopping for insurance – personalized, instant, and available across any device or platform.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this shift. Modern insurance customers don’t just want digital access to policies; they demand tailored coverage options that fit their unique needs and lifestyles. For insurers, this means the ability to rapidly develop and launch new products has become critical to maintaining and growing market share.
Yet the traditional product development cycle is very inefficient. Even minor policy changes face a gauntlet of approvals before joining lengthy IT queues. The process of translating Excel-based insurance models into production code can stretch for months or even years – consuming valuable time and resources in scoping, documentation, development, and testing. Building the accompanying customer-facing experience adds another layer of complexity and delay.
Case Study: Accelerating a Life Insurance Product Launch with Coherent Spark
While many insurers struggle with lengthy development cycles, some are finding innovative ways to bridge the gap between customer expectations and technical constraints. One leading life insurance provider faced a particularly pressing challenge: accelerating their product development and enabling advisors to deliver highly personalized customer interactions - all within just 3.5 months.
As a highly regulated industry, life insurance often involves lengthy processes for educating, quoting, and onboarding customers. The company recognized that modern financial advisors require sophisticated tools to effectively demonstrate product value. Their vision was a scenario-driven sales platform that would allow advisors to illustrate policy benefits in real-time, creating personalized experiences for each potential customer. This tool would become a key part of their sales technology.
However, the timeline presented multiple challenges. The insurance product was still under development in Excel – the traditional workspace for actuaries - and required rigorous testing to validate profitability and refine scenario models. Beyond the calculations themselves, the project also called for a complete ecosystem of supporting materials, including a polished sales interface, comprehensive documentation, and distribution resources, all of which depended on final product approval.
How Coherent Spark Transformed the Development Timeline
What would typically require 6-12 months of development was accomplished in just two months using Coherent Spark, with product design refinement happening simultaneously.
This dramatic acceleration was achieved through three key technological advantages:
Instant API Generation
Coherent Spark eliminated the traditional need to recode Excel models into programming languages, automatically converting the product’s business logic into a production-ready REST API. This removed entire cycles of development and QA testing from the timeline.
Streamlined Actuarial Testing
Product actuaries could iterate rapidly through different scenarios and assumptions, with Spark providing robust version control and comprehensive execution logging. The platform’s centralized governance made it simple to restore previous versions, rerun calculations, and compare results across different API versions – essential capabilities during the intensive profitability testing phase.
Parallel Development Streams
By decoupling the product logic (managed through Coherent Spark) from the sales tool interface, development teams could work independently of actuarial refinements. The Coherent Spark API served as a stable bridge between these workstreams, enabling simultaneous progress on both the product and its digital delivery mechanism.
Transform Your Excel Estate into Enterprise-Grade Solutions
The success of this accelerated product launch highlights how Coherent Spark eliminates traditional barriers between actuarial expertise and technical delivery. Actuaries and business users can continue working in Excel while Coherent Spark transforms their work into scalable, production-ready solutions through three powerful capabilities:
- Insights: Gain deep intelligence about your Excel estate to optimize workflows and manage complexity. This visibility helps teams identify opportunities for efficiency and standardization while maintaining rigorous control over critical business logic.
- Control: Strengthen governance without sacrificing speed through built-in version control, full audit logging, and streamlined testing capabilities. This centralized control reduces key-person risk and ensures consistency, allowing actuaries to rapidly iterate on product designs with confidence.
- Transform: Deploy Excel-based logic instantly as production-ready APIs, eliminating months of recoding and testing. This seamless conversion preserves actuarial intent while enabling integration across any modern or legacy platform, making models reusable assets across teams and geographies.
For life and retirement insurers, this translates into tangible business outcomes:
- Product launches that take weeks instead of months
- Significant cost savings in both dollars and IT hours
- Enhanced governance with eliminated manual errors
- Flexible testing capabilities without system overhaul
- Improved collaboration between actuarial, IT, and business teams
Excel to Innovation: Your Competitive Edge Starts Here
Traditional Excel-based processes can either become a bottleneck or a breakthrough opportunity. Forward-thinking insurers are already using Coherent Spark to achieve what once seemed impossible: launching complex insurance products in a fraction of the traditional timeline while enhancing governance and control.
By empowering actuaries to transform their Excel models into enterprise-grade solutions, organizations can dramatically accelerate their digital transformation without disrupting established workflows or compromising on accuracy. Whether you’re looking to launch products faster, reduce operational costs, or strengthen risk management, Coherent Spark provides the foundation for agile innovation in an increasingly competitive market.
