Karsten Steinmetz: Our starting point was how to deal with one of the biggest hurdles in our clients’ business processes: follow-up questions for the insured person’s physician that arise during the assessment of an application. Right now, such inquiries typically cause massive delays in the application process, are too labour-intensive, and often return inconsistent results. In order to overcome these challenges for our clients during the sale process, we began developing MIRApply Physician in 2016. Our initial efforts proved to be successful, so we applied the same principle to claimant risk inquiries, and developed MIRApply Insured.

So these two modules had been filling the two remaining analogue gaps in the digital application process since the end of 2017. And at around the same time, we started working on CLARA, which involved adapting a claims handling concept developed by our colleagues in Australia for the German market. In doing so, we were able to benefit from the experience we had recently gained with MIRApply. And that is basically how we got the idea for a platform, and the MIRA Digital Suite was born. In the meantime, at least ten large life insurers have started using services from the MIRA Digital Suite in our pilot market in Germany, which corresponds to a share of over 50%.

Steinmetz: The MIRA Digital Suite contains extremely agile and tailored services that directly address the problems that our customers face in the digitalisation process. MIRApply Physician, MIRApply Insured and CLARA are just the beginning, but are already delivering immense gains in efficiency. For example, CLARA cuts average handling times for disability insurance claims in half: from 200 down to 100 days. In the best cases, it allows the claim to be dealt with and completed in only five days.

Moreover, we are constantly digitising our know-how and making it available to our clients in the form of machine-readable rules – including data-analytics functions that are becoming more extensive every day. And thanks to the MIRA PoS, this means that clients can not only integrate the MIRA Digital Suite into their own systems, but also that they can connect third-party applications to our services. This increases data portability and allows the data-analytics functions to access the clients’ own in-house data pools.

Steinmetz: Technically speaking, MIRA PoS is an application programming interface, or API for short. It is the technology that allows the services of the MIRA Digital Suite to be integrated into our clients’ application landscapes.

It also offers our clients the possibility of developing their own solutions, which can then access certain MDS functionalities and data via the interfaces. The way that MIRA flexibly orchestrates the various interchangeable service modules, regardless of location, is state-of-the-art in modern software development.

I can illustrate the various benefits using a concrete example: one of our existing clients was already using MIRApply Physician and MIRApply Insured when it decided it also wanted to automate its point-of-sale underwriting. Since it had already set up a digital online connection, it was easier to just re-use that and, using the MIRA PoS, expand its existing digital application questionnaire to include the MIRA Digital Suite’s risk assessment rules. As a result, all of its underwriting decisions are now consistent and based on the same information, whether at the point of sale, or later as a medical inquiry or question posed to the applicant. The entire process is digital and the decisions remain the same.