Moving from IT-driven to end-user driven transformation

Moving from IT-driven to end-user driven transformation

Customer experience is the core to success in the insurance industry and to elevate these levels of service, Royal Exchange General Insurance Company undertook an enterprise-wide digitalisation journey with Kissflow.

John Agbai, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Royal Exchange General Insurance Company
John Agbai, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Royal Exchange General Insurance Company

Royal Exchange Assurance Nigeria is an insurance company in Nigeria licensed to cover life and non-life insurance. This includes general insurance, health insurance and life assurance. The company also offers banking products and services for asset management, credit financing and microfinancing. The company’s head office is in Lagos, Nigeria. Royal Exchange Assurance Nigeria is listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Royal Exchange General Insurance Company has one of the largest branch networks in its sector with 16 branches nationwide and four business directorates. The company is one of the few insurance companies in Nigeria that has secured an oil and gas treaty to enable it to position itself for active participation in the emerging domestication of oil and gas risks underwriting due to the local content policy of the Federal Government of Nigeria.

Royal Exchange General Insurance, Nigeria’s oldest and largest insurance provider, has embarked on extensive digitalisation of its internal business operations using the Kissflow Low-Code Platform. As a result, 75% of the company’s enterprise operations now run on Kissflow’s platform, yielding a significant degree of automation and substantial enhancement to the efficiency of operations.

“Customer experience is paramount to success in the insurance industry and any delays in processing claims can result in attrition and tarnishing of the brand image. To elevate our level of service, we recently undertook an enterprise-wide digitalisation journey by leveraging Kissflow,” says John Agbai, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Royal Exchange General Insurance Company.

About the solution

Kissflow provides a unified work platform for enterprises to fast-track digital transformation. The work platform brings together the entire spectrum of work management into a unified experience for enterprise-wide users by embracing the low-code, no-code paradigm.

Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer, Kissflow
Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer, Kissflow

Kissflow’s low-code platform empowers enterprises to transform their business operations in a rapid, convenient, and cost-effective manner. The platform unlocks the tremendous potential of an organisation’s line of business experts, turning them into capable citizen developers.

This culture of citizen development is fostered by user-friendly interfaces for business users, while enabling enterprise IT teams to retain control and keep security and resilience in place with a robust development and governance layer.

In this way, the Kissflow platform enables every enterprise user to build and manage applications, processes, tasks, analytics, integration, and collaboration in a unified platform. “Today, hundreds of enterprises such as Pepsi, McDermott, Comcast, and Danone, rely on Kissflow to simplify their work,” says Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer, Kissflow.

With Gartner projecting that by 2025, 70% of new enterprise applications will be developed using low-code and no-code platforms, this is rapidly becoming one of the most dynamic segments of the IT market. In the low-code paradigm, Kissflow stands apart in this crowded space by offering a solution that comprehensively solves the messy middle of the enterprise operations.

Backend systems make up an organisation’s core technology. It might be an ERP or CRM system or another proprietary tool. The entire business relies on these systems to function and keep things moving and consequently, everything here is highly structured and precise.

Similarly, front-end systems are prioritised as they make up the enterprise’s direct connection to customers. They are your outward-facing applications built on a platform that gives the business your complete control over the experience and functionality. These systems are incredibly polished and streamlined.

“In between these well-crafted systems is the middle, where all internal operations lie. These systems are neither structured nor precise, neither polished nor streamlined. In fact, the middle office is usually a mess,” points out Varadharajan.

Most internal operations are managed with spreadsheets and email. The more sophisticated solutions are a web of third-party applications, macros, scripts, and integrations. They do not exist on a single platform, but on whatever each business department started using ten years ago.

Kissflow enables IT and business department managers to leverage the platform to create applications quickly and efficiently to solve their business problems.

Enterprises can build various solutions on Kissflow, from custom multifunctional applications to automated human-centric processes, issue tracking, and project management. Salient features of the platform include the following.

Productivity gains and benefits

Kissflow is user-friendly and intuitive, enabling businesses to build, deploy, and manage applications without coding. Kissflow is highly customisable, allowing users to tailor their applications and processes to their specific needs.

Kissflow provides unhindered scalability and keeps up with the growing demands of organisations of all sizes. For IT, Kissflow provides a built-in governance layer to unleash innovation without giving up control and security.

To date, Royal Exchange General Insurance has successfully digitalised eight core operations including policy booking and claims which translates to more rapid and responsive customer service, and enhanced productivity for our employees.

Using the analytics module of the Kissflow platform, Royal Exchange General Insurance has also implemented real-time dashboards to track the progress of claims processing. This flags claims that are approaching their deadlines and creates accountability, thereby encouraging strict adherence to SLAs.

The automation ensures that customers are kept up-to-date via email or SMS at every stage in the claims process. As a result, the insurance provider was able to bring down claims processing time from three days down to two hours, and reduce customer churn by 80%.

With the ongoing digitalisation made possible by Kissflow, Royal Exchange General Insurance has also been able to embrace hybrid work, ensuring its operations continue smoothly no matter where the employees are based. The benefits of this were evident during the Nigerian elections when employees worked from home and could still ensure customers’ requirements were served.

Another key area enhanced by Kissflow has been budgeting, which thanks to digitisation and automation is now both highly transparent and streamlined. This visibility and control have helped reduce instances of budget overruns at the company by 85%.

Moving forward

Royal Exchange General Insurance is looking to build on its successes with Kissflow and is currently looking to further leverage the platform’s low-code capabilities for building custom application development.

Kissflow’s low-code aims to eliminate the barriers of technical skills by enabling both IT and non-IT staff such as line-of-business managers and department heads to collaborate and develop customised applications that automate and streamline business processes.

“We are looking to build an investment application and HR application, and Kissflow’s low-code platform will enable us to engage all stakeholders in the development process which will no doubt yield impactful outcomes,” said Agbai. Kissflow’s user interface and functionality have helped in showing value to end-users and get management buy-in, increasing user adoption and change management. Kissflow is helping the enterprise to achieve its long-term IT objectives.

Kissflow has put Royal Exchange General Insurance on a new digital transformation journey. Kissflow’s solutions have dissolved traditional barriers to innovation and redefined roles in the organisation by empowering individuals beyond the IT team.

“We have gone from IT-driven transformation initiatives to the end-user driven one. More and more, employees and management are coming up with problems to solve using Kissflow,” adds Agbai.

Agbai now considers Kissflow to be a strategic partner in achieving its vision of becoming the number one general insurance provider in Nigeria.


Snapshot of REGIC’s transformation

  • 75% of the company’s enterprise operations now run on Kissflow’s platform, yielding a significant degree of automation and substantial enhancement to efficiency of operations.
  • Royal Exchange General Insurance has digitalised eight core operations including policy booking and claims which translates to more responsive customer service.
  • Using the analytics module of the Kissflow platform, Royal Exchange General Insurance has implemented real-time dashboards to track the progress of claims processing.
  • Royal Exchange General Insurance was able to bring down claims processing time from three days to two hours, and reduce customer churn by 80%.
  • With ongoing digitalisation, Royal Exchange General Insurance has been able to embrace hybrid work, ensuring operations continue smoothly no matter where employees are based.
  • Another key area enhanced by Kissflow has been budgeting and visibility and control have helped reduce budget overruns by 85%.

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