Leobit
Cloud-Based Insurance and Brokerage Platform
Data platform modernization and custom development helping a Bermuda-based energy insurer to keep up with industry progress
ABOUT the project
- Client:
- Mutual insurance company covering energy-sector assets
- Location:
-
Scotland
- Company Size:
- 80+ Employees
- Industry:
- Insurance
Leobit partnered with a Scotland-based mutual insurer to replace an aging in-house platform with a modern ecosystem: packaged core components integrated through a custom layer, a data warehouse consolidating both of its books of business, and a portal that turns broker spreadsheet submissions into structured underwriting data. The first releases moved reporting off the legacy platform and onto Power BI dashboards fed by a single governed warehouse.
Leobit already knew our systems and our industry, so we skipped the education phase entirely. They helped us buy what makes sense to buy and build what makes us different — and that difference is now in software we own.
Customer
The client is a mutual insurance company headquartered in Scotland, where about 95% of its 80-plus employees are based. It insures trillions of dollars of assets in the energy sector through two business units: a mutual book, by far the largest and the company’s primary focus, and a specialty book. Its underwriting relies on submissions received from brokers around the world.
Business Challenge
The company had grown on top of an internally built platform and a ton of legacy processes and systems accumulated over years of operation. Leadership set a goal to totally revamp the entire infrastructure and ecosystem: retire the in-house platform, adopt proven off-the-shelf components where they made sense, and integrate them into one coherent system.
One of their main challenges was underwriting intake. Brokers deliver risk information as Excel workbooks, which the team re-keyed and reconciled by hand before it could inform a decision. They needed a mature data workflow that would be accelerated through AI integration and involve a database, an ETL, a data warehouse, and visualization, along with a portal for bringing broker data in cleanly. With a lean internal IT group focused on running the business, the company needed an outside engineering team to design and deliver it.
Why Leobit
Leobit had already supported the company’s IT side through a period of major internal change, and a year of collaboration had built mutual trust with the CIO. Just as important was our insurance domain fluency, as the customer was satisfied with the depth of our knowledge in industry-specific workflows.
Project
in detail
Leobit staffed the engagement around a solution architect with an insurance industry background and proposed starting with working sessions. Our team moved straight into planning the roadmap and solutioning the first project together with the client’s head of technology.
A solutions architect and a business analyst ran a series of working sessions with the CIO, mapped the legacy platform and the data flows around it, and produced a transformation roadmap with an estimate for the first phase. The roadmap sequenced the work: stand up the data warehouse first, then the broker-submission portal, then reporting and AI-assisted intake on top.
Leobit’s dedicated team involved the solutions architect, two .NET engineers, a data/BI engineer, a front-end engineer, and a QA engineer, with a project manager and DevOps engineer part-time. The client’s CIO acted as product owner. Work ran in two-week sprints with demos at each boundary, day-to-day communication in Teams, and tracking in Azure DevOps, so the small client-side team stayed involved without being pulled away from operations.
The team implemented the warehouse and ETL pipelines, integrated the selected off-the-shelf components through a custom API layer, and delivered the broker-submission portal and Power BI reporting incrementally, releasing to underwriters as each slice became usable.
Flexible and Well-Organized Architecture
The architectural bet was composability. Rather than rebuilding commodity insurance functionality, the client adopted off-the-shelf products for it. That’s where the Leobit team has built the connective tissue: an ASP.NET Core integration layer exposing the packaged components through consistent APIs, with custom modules on top for the workflows that differentiate the company. The design keeps vendors replaceable and concentrates custom code exactly where it earns its keep.
An Ingestion Portal for Broker Submissions
Broker Excel workbooks arrive in as many formats as there are brokers. The portal lets brokers and internal staff upload submissions, then uses Azure OpenAI to extract structured fields from the workbooks, validates them against business rules, and queues exceptions for human review. Clean records land in the warehouse within minutes, so underwriters work from consistent data instead of reconciling spreadsheets. Every submission is recorded and can be queried on demand, ensuring better operational manageability and compliance.
A Warehouse Spanning Mutual and Specialty Books
The data/BI engineer designed a dimensional model that covers both business units in one schema, with Azure Data Factory pipelines pulling from the packaged components, the portal, and remaining legacy sources into MS SQL Server on Azure. Power BI reads from the warehouse alone, which ended the era of competing numbers: the mutual book, the specialty book, and management all see the same figures.
The Journey
Behind Our Success
Technology Solutions
- Flexible and manageable integration level built over the off-the-shelf components and portal back end powered with .NET
- Convenient broker-submission portal built with React.js and TypeScript
- Azure-based architecture involving Azure Data Factory for ETL pipelines and warehousing, MS SQL Server as the main database, Azure DevOps for CI/CD, and Power BI for underwriting and management dashboards
- Azure OpenAI models used for automated extraction of structured data from broker Excel submissions
Value Delivered
- One source of truth for underwriting and management data, which replaces a legacy in-house platform
- Broker submission intake without manual re-keying, cutting turnaround from days of spreadsheet handling to same-day structured data
- Competitive advantage preserved: commodity capability is bought, differentiating capability is custom software the client owns
- Continuous support of the customer’s technical team by our technology experts
- A data foundation ready for the company’s next AI use cases, already proven by the AI-assisted submission intake workflow
