Case study: KBIS

KBIS British Equestrian Insurance is one of the UK’s largest independent equestrian insurance providers. With over 30 years of experience, they offer insurance cover for the complete equestrian lifestyle from horse to home and everything in between.

As one of the UK’s leading independent horse insurance specialists, KBIS had been using two different insurance systems, both of which were approaching end-of-life. Both these systems had originally been developed for communication by printed documents and had poor integration with emails and online. This was causing issues with managing timely updates, fixing bugs, and developing new features, causing KBIS to seek a new solution. Their aim was to consolidate their processes into one system, streamlining the business, improving data access, and allowing them to bring new insurance products to market more quickly.

KBIS carried out an exhaustive evaluation of the insurance software marketplace and concluded that existing systems had all been designed around motor and household cover and did not provide a good solution for niche products. It quickly became clear that a bespoke development solution was the only way that they could guarantee to meet their complex needs. They chose KLOC as their software development partner based on its excellent track record with bespoke solution delivery for business-critical systems.

KLOC elected to develop the new system using Microsoft ASP.NET Core C# and Entity Framework Core running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to ensure that KBIS had a cutting-edge basis for the new solution that would guarantee support for many years to come, as well as providing enterprise-grade performance for security, scalability, resilience, and performance.

The new, bespoke insurance system, ParaCode, allows KBIS to manage all aspects of customer accounts, policies and claims in one place. They have been able to replace the two systems they were using and have also benefited from spending significantly less time preparing policy documentation and administering claims. New versions of insurance contracts, known as ‘binders’ can be implemented instantly by KBIS staff – a job that used to take weeks and require significant developer time.

Further enhancements are already in the pipeline with portals for web customers and insurance agents slated for V2 and V3 respectively.

Guy Prest, Managing Director of KBIS, said, “KLOC have succeeded where many others have failed in developing a bespoke insurance system. It has completely changed our business and allows us to complete our business processes in one place. The most important aspect is that we are no longer limited in our plans to change or develop new products by our software but can make the correct decisions for the business, and the software adapts to fit the plan. We continue to work with KLOC on further developments and improvements to the system.”

Jim Parsons, Managing Director of KLOC, said “Working with KBIS to deliver their vision for a new bespoke solution has been a fantastic experience. They have been very progressive in their approach, and I truly believe that the resultant product is a world-class policy administration system.”