How Reinsurance Life Built a Business-Critical Insurance Application Using Low-Code

Adaptability in the life insurance industry requires not only product and service updates but also agile management practices and information systems that can keep up with rapid change. With some domains iterating on a monthly basis, the volatility poses significant challenges for traditional enterprises.

Reinsurance Life is spearheading digital transformation, positioning itself as a leading organization that can keep pace with this evolving landscape.

However, their approach to IT transformation in recent years highlights a common misconception: “Digital transformation is often viewed as solely the responsibility of the IT department, but this perspective is a major reason why such initiatives fail,” shared Hongqi Shi, vice president overseeing IT strategy and operations at Reinsurance Life.

For insurers, it is crucial for leadership and management teams to adopt a digital-first mindset to ensure strategic alignment and foster collaboration at all levels. Recognizing this, Reinsurance Life adopted the Mendix development platform to enhance its digital capabilities and improving operational efficiency.

A One-Stop Platform with Multifaceted Benefits

Identifying the right solution among countless options was critical for Reinsurance Life, especially as a small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited room for trial and error.

During the development of its claims platform on the official WeChat account, Reinsurance Life’s IT team realized traditional Java-based development couldn’t meet the demands of rapid business growth and iteration.

“Modern IT architecture is evolving toward decoupled, distributed, and flattened structures, enabling faster and more efficient iteration,” Shi shared.

By transitioning to a low-code platform, Reinsurance Life observed notable reductions in development time and costs, particularly as the component library expanded. For example, a group insurance claims project required 15% less effort compared to traditional methods.

Mendix provided a solution tailored to Reinsurance Life’s needs that:

Ensures strong connections between models and applications, promoting accuracy and consistency.
Supports agile development with improved communication and faster iterations.
Improves code readability, benefiting teams with high personnel turnover.
Reduces development workloads by leveraging reusable components, minimizing custom coding.
Enhances code standardization, reusability, version control, and collaboration capabilities, fostering a more efficient development environment.

“It is also a model-driven, visual development platform offering robust connectivity and extensibility,” Shi added.

Digitizing Claims Reporting with Low-Code

Reinsurance Life’s first low-code application—a claims and reporting system—showcased the platform’s potential for delivering fast, efficient results. Despite an initial learning curve, the project demonstrated significant time and cost savings:

Development timelines reduced to 33 days (vs. approximately 46 days with traditional coding)
System launch cycles were cut by 30%
Human resource costs decreased by 30%

As the team’s experience with the platform grew, the benefits of reusable components and a modular library became evident, further enhancing efficiency.

Scaling Low-Code Across the Organization

With the success of its first low-code application, Reinsurance Life plans to expand its use of Mendix across additional projects, including:

Digital marketing initiatives
Customer intelligence services
Content management systems

By leveraging reusable components across projects, the company aims to further reduce development time and costs, enabling faster deployment and broader adoption of digital solutions.

Mendix has proven to be a key enabler, driving Reinsurance Life’s ongoing success in a fast-evolving industry.