Swann Insurance is Australia’s largest niche provider of motorcycle insurance. With over 50 years of leading-market experience, Swann provides tailored motorcycle and car insurance products to over 750,000 Australians.

With vehicle sales declining and competitive pressure increasing, Swann recognised the need to respond to changing market conditions. After undertaking an extensive assessment of their options, Swann enlisted the help of DiUS to better enable car and motorcycle dealerships to more effectively sell finance and insurance at point of sale.

Swann also wanted to build an in-house capability to manage its own infrastructure at a team level. Playing a key role in developing this capability, DiUS co-located and paired with Swann developers to support uplift and transfer technical development expertise and agile delivery practices.

DiUS facilitated a three day inception workshop; bringing together key stakeholders from across the business to develop a shared understanding of the business model, product vision, success criteria, technology landscape, constraints and risks.

With the foundation in place, user research was conducted early on to promote human centred design practices within the project team and to understand and empathise with current and prospective users. This helped identify personas and uncover pain points with the current platform, enabling the team to redesign the experience to increase uptake.

Being mindful of building the right thing, the team delivered incrementally and iteratively – starting with a standalone ‘quick quote’ tool as a minimum viable product to start learning from end users. Using a build-measure-learn way of working, the team went on to develop the remaining solution. Designs were continually validated with end users, using clickable prototypes and working software to provide rapid feedback.

Using modern technologies, the team built a web-based application using AngularJS on a microservices architecture. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, the team was able to quickly develop and refine the infrastructure on an as-needed basis. Working closely with enterprise IT, they were able to integrate the application with the existing architecture.

With Swann responding to strong forces in their market, decisions around how to plan the release of features was critical. DiUS and Swann worked closely to prioritise the product backlog and define a roll-out plan that targeted appropriate market segments to meet the policies-per-sale success metric. With an intimate awareness of market needs and opportunities, embedding the Product Owner with the team and close collaboration at every stage was paramount to the success of the project.

Additionally, Swann account managers responsible for driving uptake of the application, along with other key stakeholders were invited to attend fortnightly showcases. This collaborative approach allowed stakeholders to see the application incrementally evolve and helped maintain a tight feedback loop.

“The project was able to deliver value to our dealers within weeks of starting, which was continually expanded on as the project evolved. This enabled far greater collaboration with our network to ensure that what was delivered actually met the needs of our customers.” 

– Chris Bignoux – Sales and Distribution Operations Manager (Product Owner), Swann Insurance

In just two months, Swann’s new application, Ignite, exceeded expectations in revenue uplift and demonstrated strong uptake from new and existing users alike. Swann are continuing to enhance aspects of the system in response to direct feedback from users, while also adding functionality to drive more value from their investment.