Swiss Re Magnum AI and cloud solution ready to enable data-driven underwriting and empower your automated ecosystem

Experts in risk knowledge 

Swiss Re is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance, and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer. The company anticipates and manages risk ranging from natural catastrophes to climate change and from aging populations to cybercrime. Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, Swiss Re operates globally across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Magnum is one of Swiss Re’s flagship L&H solutions, a white-labeled digital platform that automates the assessment of biometric risks and life and health insurance underwriting. It allows insurers to respond to changing consumer buying behavior toward faster, more intuitive, and engaging insurance buying experiences. Magnum helps clients to grow their businesses by speeding up the underwriting process and increasing conversion, while also offering them the opportunity to tap into new channels, hence contributing to increased insurance penetration and ultimately addressing the life and health protection gap. Swiss Re licenses the solution to clients, primarily insurance companies, to work in conjunction with their point of sale (POS) systems and provide compelling, personalized offerings to applicants. Insurance agents use Magnum to build a multidimensional applicant profile, including medical history, occupation risk level, family history, and travel risk. Magnum calculates the risk level and decides when to accept an applicant for an insurance policy and at what price adjustment.

Typically, life and health insurance underwriting is a manual, nuanced process. Swiss Re’s vision for Magnum is to create a cutting-edge platform that simplifies the insurance application process and that leverages data to help clients make smarter, more profitable decisions. The company sought to move Magnum to the cloud to access more data sources easily and to leverage AI and machine learning capabilities to create an innovative and dynamic product. Additionally, the cloud provided a way for Magnum to further expand its client base to also serve smaller clients with a modular, scalable, and standardized SaaS offering.

“By moving our decision engine to the cloud, we could ease some of the challenges with fragmented data distribution and offer additional services to our clients,” says Dylan Rowe, Head L&H Automated Solutions at Swiss Re.

Transformation in the cloud

Swiss Re was doing more than a lift and shift of applications—it wanted to access new capabilities through a cloud-native suite of services. Swiss Re decided to adopt Microsoft Azure. “Security, availability, and reliability were three non-negotiable elements to us, and we found that Azure had compelling solutions that fit our requirements best,” says Ashish Agarwal, Director, Product Area Lead Magnum at Swiss Re.

Swiss Re uses the Azure App Service Environment in Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host applications that need a high degree of memory and scalability. The company adopted Azure API Management and also uses the Log Analytics and Application Insights features in Azure Monitor. Data is integrated into Azure Synapse Analytics to offer a state-of-the-art, cloud-native, self-service solution that provides critical insights required by insurance clients to allow them to stay ahead of the game and continuously improve in a very competitive market. Moreover, the data generated by the machine learning models is available for reporting.

Swiss Re transformed its client offerings by moving to the cloud. “By running Magnum on Azure, we were able to optimize the underwriting processes based on deep data insights,” says Rowe.

Furthermore, using the Azure machine learning cloud offerings enabled Swiss Re to deliver a wide range of AI-powered, differentiated capabilities that allow clients to cross-sell and/or upsell offerings, spot anomalies, and identify propensity to buy, and many other capabilities. “We see AI as a key enabler in our journey toward the future of underwriting,” says Dan Lacurezeanu, Swiss Re’s Automated Underwriting Program Manager.

New business model, new markets

Swiss Re now has the flexibility to offer a wide range of SaaS solutions ranging from Magnum Go and Magnum Pure on Cloud to the new Data & Analytics offering, a machine learning platform, in addition to multiple other capabilities currently planned.

Magnum Go brings a standardized setup with minimum customization capabilities that small and mid-sized insurance companies can adopt quickly. “We have increased scalability by standardizing and streamlining our services in Magnum Go,” says Agarwal. “Before we moved to Azure, Magnum was more suitable for large clients, but now our software is accessible to a wider range of companies.”

Magnum Pure, which is the premium solution, provides more customization possibilities. Clients can choose between the traditional on-premises version or use Magnum Pure On Cloud, which comes as a fully managed SaaS offering.

Ensuring the “right client, right product” fit is important to Swiss Re. This is demonstrated by the commitment to have modularity at the center of Magnum and an easy upgrade path. “We can first onboard clients on Magnum Go and then over time, if they so desire, enable them to expand toward the full-fledged Pure offering,” says Lacurezeanu.

Improved collaboration and efficiency

Although underwriting assessments may at times be complex, Swiss Re successfully managed to increase automation and significantly improve interview process efficiency. According to Lacurezeanu, Magnum uses a proprietary set of over 30,000 rules. Azure opens up new possibilities to leverage them to add even more value to clients.

In the past, clients that had questions about the underwriting rules would reach out to Swiss Re for review and subsequent changes. This approach was time-consuming and created issues with version control. “Azure allowed us to open up new collaboration capabilities with our clients. We can make changes jointly, provide real-time feedback, and share expertise more easily,” says Rowe.

Agarwal concludes, “We now have a single source of truth in Azure, where we can collaborate on the rules that will ultimately drive underwriting decisions. We are formalizing our 150 years of underwriting knowledge to help our clients speed up time to market and make more efficient decisions.”

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