From Silos to an AI-Ready Ecosystem: How Helvetia Italy Group Reduced Time-to-Market by 30% with Mia-Platform.

A Strategic Partnership to Unlock the Value of Data

Helvetia Italy Group‘s innovation journey demonstrates how a modern, composable approach can transform layered legacy systems into an agile, future-proof ecosystem.

Through its collaboration with Mia-Platform, Helvetia has adopted a Digital Integration Hub that has not only reduced operating costs and time to market, but has also created a robust “data factory.” This infrastructure now enables the rapid composition of new services and accelerates the launch of AI-driven solutions on an enterprise scale.

Industry: Insurance

Helvetia’s Ambition: Strength and Reliability Over Time

The Helvetia Italia Group’s ambition is to be a solid, reliable partner for clients and intermediaries when it matters most, both today and in the future, capable of generating lasting value. The Group strives to offer reliable, high-quality insurance solutions, effectively addressing the needs of families and enterprises. It aims to stand out for its excellent service and offerings in the strategic Retail, SME, and Specialty Lines segments. It leverages its core competencies through an efficient operating model to ensure support, continuity, and lasting value.

Background and First Challenges (2009-2017)

Between 2009 and 2017, Helvetia embarked on a significant growth journey in Italy through strategic acquisitions, inheriting a layered and fragmented IT landscape. Helvetia Italy Group faced both technical and business-related structural challenges:

Monolithic architecture characterized by application silos and proprietary database logic.
Redundancy due to data and code duplication on isolated systems for each business line.
Operational constraints from nighttime and weekend maintenance windows, resulting in system unavailability.
Lack of an API-centric strategy perpetuated a technological barrier that hindered rapid integrations with the external ecosystem.

These challenges led to inadequate response times: integrating a new channel took 6 to 9 months, exacerbating costs and resulting in a fragmented customer experience.

Towards a Systemic Platform (2018-2020)

In 2019, the business understood they urgently needed a single, centralized tool to group contact centers and provide operators with near-real-time (under 10 seconds) access to customer data, policies, and claims 24/7. The goal was to avoid impacting existing legacy systems while ensuring production deployment within just six months.

The Solution: Digital Integration Hub (DIH)

To address this need, Helvetia Italy Group adopted a cloud-native architecture based on microservices, APIs, and event-driven logic. The key was the implementation of an innovative Digital Integration Hub (DIH) based on Mia-Platform’s Data Fabric architectural approach.

This framework enabled the creation of:

A data decoupling software layer: The DIH acts as a middle layer that offloads portfolio systems, ensuring high performance and 24/7 data availability, independent of the operation of core systems.
The creation of Single Customer Views: holistic, consolidated, and real-time representations of all data related to a specific customer. Thanks to the DIH, customer information, policies, claims, and payments are aggregated from various systems and made immediately available via APIs to various touchpoints.

Why Mia-Platform?

Helvetia chose Mia-Platform as a tech partner for several key reasons. First, its positioning as a leader in cloud-native and DevOps enablement; second, its pioneering approach with a proven Digital Integration Hub architecture. The solution has not only been mentioned in multiple Gartner reports but also achieved excellent scores in all internal technical tests conducted by the insurance company.

First Results: The Beginning of the Change

The benefits were immediate and tangible:

The new unified contact center was brought into production within the required 6 months.
The time required to integrate a new channel dropped to 1 month.
In two years, 8 new channel integrations were successfully completed.
Data refresh time (via Single View) dropped below 2 seconds.
The system achieved the desired 24/7 availability.
Response times dropped to less than 50 milliseconds.
Over 4 million customers were aggregated within Single Views.

Scaling and Acceleration (2020-2024)

The company’s growth was relentless. The launch of new projects has triggered an evolution towards an agile and modular operating model. Two key scenarios boosted this process: the need to comply with IVASS Regulation 41/2018, which prioritized the enhancement of the Private Area (Home Insurance) for the digital management of policies and claims in the non-life sector, and the development of a new web app for the sale of a diversified portfolio of company products.

Helvetia Italy Group’s Digital Platform: An Interconnected Ecosystem

The Digital Integration Hub became the single entry point for all Helvetia Italy Group systems, simplifying integration with external partners and accelerating the evolution of the business towards:

Strategic integrations: A seamless interconnection was created between the proprietary Life application and RGA systems, as well as a microservices architecture that connects BNL’s front-end banking systems with the back-end systems for Non-Life products.
Cross-functional services and PBCs: the adoption of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs), such as the Payment Integration Hub, allowed centralizing payment logic on a single service that can interface with various providers, optimizing the management of collection flows.
Regulatory responsiveness: The microservices infrastructure ensured extremely rapid response to new industry requirements (such as IVASS Regulation 41/2018), drastically reducing time to compliance.
Modernization: This process enabled the progressive decommissioning of legacy on-premise services, modernizing the entire application portfolio with a dual impact: significant cost savings and a huge increase in overall performance.

The Acceleration: A Composable Approach as the Business Engine

The adoption of the Mia-Platform Catalog has significantly accelerated the process, acting as the organization’s digital twin: it maps corporate assets and their metadata in real time, enabling full application composability.

Thanks to a library of reusable building blocks, Helvetia Italy Group has transformed data into ready-made assets to be assembled into Single Views (such as those dedicated to policies and claims) and new digital products.

This approach has generated:

New interconnected channels served directly from the platform.
Data exposed through dedicated APIs, designed to power the ecosystem securely.
Business agility guaranteed by the ability to compose new applications starting from services already listed and ready-to-use in the Catalog.

A Cultural Revolution: Towards the Composable Enterprise

This profound transformation didn’t just involve code. Data and services, once seen as silos, became open assets available to the entire IT factory. Handling this change in a large organization required a tailored approach that involved both tools and processes.

The reorganization involved:

Feature Teams: Directly responsible for the development of various data products and application services.
Platform Team: Dedicated to managing the Catalog and pipelines, and to the architectural evolution of the platform.
Mia-Platform Academy: A structured plan of masterclasses and training sessions to define and consolidate new organizational dynamics.

KPIs Confirm the Success of the Initiative

The consolidation of the new operating model allowed Helvetia to achieve measurable systemic benefits on several fronts:

-30% time-to-market: For the launch of new commercial products and services.
-18% in average project costs: Thanks to the reuse of assets in the Catalog.
New business models: Radically simplifying partner and third-party onboarding.
Security-by-design: Standardization of security levels through OpenID and OAuth2 protocols.
Resilience and compliance: Drastic reduction of compliance times with stringent and complex regulations such as GDPR, DORA, and NIS2.

A New Revolution: The Era of AI (2024-Today)

Today, artificial intelligence is the undisputed protagonist of a new technological revolution. However, large-scale AI adoption requires a rigorous balance between rapid innovation and risk management (model reliability, data compliance and security, asset standardization and reuse).

Helvetia Italy Group has addressed these needs by building, with the help of Mia-Platform, a digital context governed by the platform. This provides the operational and security guardrails necessary to govern AI at enterprise scale. Policies and processes are integrated into the company catalog, making services AI-ready. The system’s effectiveness relies on the availability of structured data enriched with metadata, allowing orchestrators to interact directly with corporate systems to automate complex tasks.

Being technologically “AI-ready” has allowed Helvetia Italy Group to rapidly enable highly customized scenarios. As of now, the company has successfully implemented 9 real use cases, demonstrating extraordinary diversification in the Claims, Non-Life, and Life sectors.

Claims: Automation of reporting and claims filing, intelligent management of agency documents, accelerated settlements, simplified employee medical reimbursements, and advanced support for legal proceedings.
Non-Life: Formal notice automation, broker collection optimization, and intelligent Digital Mailroom management.
Life: Automation of transfers related to pension funds.

Words from the leadership

Innovation means valorizing data transforming it into a ready-to-use strategic asset, optimizing the decision-making process, and facilitating the scalability of our offering. The digital platform built by our Group in collaboration with Mia-Platform is now a key enabler for future innovations. This ongoing journey has a clear goal: to transform data into a tangible and sustainable competitive advantage over time.

About Helvetia

Helvetia Baloise is Switzerland’s largest multi-line insurer and one of Europe’s leading insurance groups. The company serves approximately 13 million clients daily, offering pension, financial, and insurance solutions, including specialty insurance and reinsurance, for individuals, families, SMEs, and large international corporations. Headquartered in Basel, Helvetia operates in eight European markets and strategic hubs and specialty markets such as Singapore, London, and Miami, combining strong Swiss roots with an international focus. Helvetia offers customized solutions for clients, solid investments for shareholders (with HBAN shares listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange), and development opportunities for employees. Helvetia has had a consolidated presence in Italy since 1948; today, it operates and offers its services through a widespread network of agencies, brokers, affinity groups, and banking partners. The Italian market accounts for approximately 10% of the Group’s total premium volume, amounting to 11.5 billion Swiss francs.