APIs as a vector for insurance development

Wakam is one of the pioneers of “open insuring” in Europe. Even if there is no PSD2-type directive for insurers (directive requiring banks to open their information systems to third parties), Wakam has been working for several years now on integrating APIs at the heart of its model.

Our first services in the form of APIs were introduced in September 2017, more precisely pricing APIs that allow a price to be set dynamically according to the level of risk. After several months of experimentation with several partners, Wakam generalized the use of APIs in April 2018 with the launch of its IPaaS (Insurance Product as a Service) platform, which now contains more than 50 API products.

APIs allow our distribution partners to consume our insurance services and deliver them to their end customers directly on their website. These APIs range from pricing to claims management and contract management. This digitisation of our products and services enables us to set up any type of partnership in less than ten weeks on average, which is a very short time in the insurance world. The use of APIs has many advantages: openness to other systems, agility, reuse of existing API bricks, cross sell with the introduction of new products, optimisation of time to market…and of course, it is also the possibility of capturing data in order to  adapt product pricing in real time.

APIs are also generating new business

“Before, we were only targeting distributors specialising in insurance, and now we’re addressing all types of distributors, even those with little knowledge of insurance“

APIS offered by Wakam are of several types, and adapted to the needs of our distribution partners:

• Pricing APIs (quotes) displaying our pricing engines, securely / confidentially, allowing us to update pricing quickly and efficiently (commercial operations, etc). We make service level commitments (availability, performance), to allow our Distributors to benefit from a reliable, robust and high-performance solution at the key moment of subscription.
  
• APIs for contract management (underwriting, cancellation, renewal, etc.) and claims management (bodily injury and property) outlining the management services that our distributors require, whether fully automated for parametric products, or operated in a more traditional manner by an outsourced management service. These APIs are intended more for non-insurance specialists or specialists without management capacity or who are looking for a short time to market

Any developer can test our APIs in a “sandbox” environment, without any action on our part, and then integrate them into their platform. These APIs are documented and described according to the Open API (Swagger) standard. Wakam commits to its partners to a fast integration: less than 10 man-days of work.

“We make sure that all the documentation is easily accessible and that our partners have all the support they need“

A few facts to know

• 10 million API calls / month since 2020.
• more than 50 products available in API. Most of them are customizable. A few examples in the domains of cars, housing and new mobilities: “mechanical breakdown car/motorcycle”, “vehicle without licence”, “on deman car insurance”, “multi-risk building”, “home sharing”.