Tech Series: Digital Disruption in Insurance

Like many other industries, insurance is facing digital disruption with new, digital-first players putting pressure on traditional insurance companies. In addition to this, technological advances around data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) or blockchain pose adoption barriers as much as they are opportunities.

Covéa is a mid-sized, Tier 1 insurer with over 60 years of experience in the UK market. The challenge, when Graeme arrived, was the same challenge affecting most insurance providers, in that insurance hasn’t really changed for a hundred years. There were lots of legacy hardware, software, and systems, technical debt and systems that existed in silos. This had to be addressed.

With the strategic aim to drive innovative technology forward, Covéa had to migrate to new technology platforms and create a new identity and culture to develop Covéa Digital as the technology-driven engine.

In this talk, Graeme will take us through how they are changing the face of insurance through disruptive and innovative technology. He guides us through:

• Step-by-step process of how the company solved the legacy issues with microservices.


• How open source technology like Kafka, Seldon and Kubeflow (for data science), as well as Python and Camunda, helped them ensure the project’s success.


• How a hybrid cloud approach with AWS and Azure supported the migration of over 370 different legacy platforms and enabled scalability and increased software’s capability and capacity.