Established in 1990, Horsell International elected to base them in Sydney. In previous years, founders John Horsell and John Saunders had worked extensively in the international insurance broking and market arena, but ultimately chose to establish Horsell International so they could apply their experience, expertise and understanding of global risk and insurance needs in an advisory, management and procurement capacity.
Since 1990, Horsell have achieved solid growth, while continuing to focus on our core ideals. Our success, which is evidenced by our client list, is due to our people who consistently display innovation and expertise in relation to risk and insurance challenges.
Horsell needed to reduce the costs attracted when signing up customer insurance policies. This needed to be managed by reducing if not removing entirely the need for customers to engage Horsell staff on the phone to purchase their policies. They needed an interface that could prompt customers to answer a series of questions and use those answers as a basis to automatically calculate the policy premium and either issue cover online (and generate all the required policy documentation) or refer the application back to Horsell staff for review. A complete version history needed to be maintained as well as the facility for customers to renew polices.
Shivam was engaged by Horsell to design a solution. A public facing website was deployed to handle the collection of policy application information. For the respective products available a design was created and product specific information was included for that products section of the site. The user can then initiate a wizard style questionnaire that prompts for all the information required by Horsell to determine the policy premium. After purchasing, the customer is emailed (and can also download from the site) the standard policy documentation (such as the product disclosure statement, policy schedule and statement of fact).
Secondly an administrative system was deployed to allow staff to easily see and administrate what policies had been created on the system. Staff could modify the policy, apply modifications to the policy premium and reissue documentation. Administrators can create new accounts for Brokers to use when creating policies on the public website. Administrators also have the ability to create reports against the policies created on the system. A common rating engine was developed to drive all Horsell products and interface with underwriting system has been created.
The solution was deployed on Windows 2008 ASP.Net 3.5 with SQL Server 2005.
Shivam created a bright minimalistic design that incorporated Horsell’s company colours where appropriate. The design pushes focus on to the main content of the page while allowing additional information to be dynamically provided to the right of the content.
Entire solution was created using modular software development approach. Multiple component integrated to deliver end-to-end user experience. Data Layer is driven by LINQ while User Interface and Business Logic has been driven by MVC and JQuery.
In order to manage changes in the way policy premiums are calculated over time Shivam abstracted the policy calculation logic into a separate versioned component. The system maintained a list of the versions of this component and was able to use the correct version of the relevant policy calculator for each quote. New quotations always used the most recent version. This allowed Horsell to make, in some cases drastic changes to the formulas which the policy used to calculate premiums without adversely effecting the processing of historical data as changes were made. This was implemented by using a class factory which then loaded the relevant assembly and instantiated the appropriate class using the .Net Frameworks very flexible reflection API.
In the years since its deployment Horsell has bound thousands of new policies using their online system horsellonline.com. Potentially saving hundreds of man hours in information collection and paper work generation/management Horsellonline.com has allowed brokers and direct customers alike to retrieve policy quotations easily with a minimum of fuss and no commitment.
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