ANVA is known for its open, stable and reliable software. That openness has led to a variety of setups at more than 400 customers over the years. That's great, of course, but it also has drawbacks. This is one of the many reasons why we developed ANVA Hub. For our customer, ANVA Hub means great benefits in terms of process optimization, acceleration and performance. A conversation about this with Daan van der Lugt, manager Sales & Marketing at ANVA.
ANVA Hub is the platform that connects all players in the insurance domain: insurers, Managing General Agents (service providers), advisors and intermediaries, with relationships to corporate and private customers. The platform also bridges the gap between ANVA's software and partners' solutions. Existing functionalities of ANVA Backo ce and new functionalities we add to ANVA Hub step by step, to meet the needs of the market. Namely scalable, secure and flexible tooling to facilitate consolidation and growth.
Daan van der Lugt: 'When the applicant and the insurance provider work on the same platform, it means that our customers can offer their services much faster and more securely. The result is tremendous process optimization: straight-through processing, which means we can handle a transaction fully automatically. But equally important is the openness of the system to our partners: data and application providers for the insurance industry. With so-called APIs, application programming interfaces, we can link parties together, so that we can facilitate the entire landscape with ANVA Hub, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
In the creation of ANVA Hub, state of the art solutions were developed for various issues, for example, around compliance. Naturally, care was taken to ensure that new and amended laws and regulations are immediately and seamlessly implemented in the software. It is therefore, for example, AVG-proof. Equally important is that changes in, for example, policy conditions, clauses and premiums are processed automatically after they have been determined by their providers. Thanks to the connection of more and more insurers "to the hub," ANVA's software is also optimally compliant in this respect. 'In this context, it is important that we can deliver new software or new versions very quickly via ANVA Hub,' says Daan. 'For our new products, we could do that every day, so to speak, if we wanted to, even without our customers noticing. Of course we notify them, but no longer with elaborate documents about technical changes. Customers should experience those changes intuitively as improvements'.
Much can be said about the backgrounds that led to ANVA Hub. For example, ANVA Backoffice, for decades the mother ship of ANVA, was developed when everyone was still working with software on their own server. Customers could customize that software to their needs and views, but these local installations were difficult to maintain. Installing new versions and hooking up data and application vendors was also often not without problems. 'In the recent period we have improved ANVA Backoffice considerably. We can certainly continue with it for another five years, but there are limits to the number of users and the number of policies to be processed,' says Daan. 'Given the wave of consolidation in the insurance industry, this is obviously not an ideal situation. We also developed ANVA Hub for that desired scalability of our software. Another reason is that we no longer build everything ourselves. Therefore, we need a modern platform that people can connect to better'. Daan adds that this last aspect has led to another important change. 'As our customers manage to automate more and more processes with our software, they also need fewer and fewer users, while ever larger policy volumes are managed by our systems. Because of this success, we have had to take a close look at our revenue model and the way customers pay us has changed. Beautifully, from now on they pay for the value they get out of our services. As far as we're concerned, that's a fairer model for everyone.
The situation described is not a vision of the future, but reality. Customers can already take advantage of ANVA Hub today. Moreover, we are already adding new developments very soon. The first is a mortgage module, including a tool for secure and auditable communication in the form of Safebay with a link to NotaryID for identification, among others. The second is customer view. Users of ANVA Hub get full access to all the facts and circumstances known about the relevant customer during customer contacts. 'It is clear that our customers' market is in a huge transition to digitalization,' Daan says in conclusion. 'As a market leader, we take our responsibility and contribute significantly to this. We are enormously proud of that!'
