Embedding Baby Insurance in Pregnancy App
Nowadays parents have a wide range of apps to choose from to assist them in their pregnancy journey. Our long-standing pregnancy app partner Preglife is a fast-growing international HealthTech company focused on creating the best pregnancy- and baby app. In 2021, we invited them to join us in developing a new API-driven baby insurance buying experience where the insurance can be offered in the app at the time it matters most.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) is a key tool embedding insurance experiences into partner channels such as websites and mobile apps. This improves the customer experience and allows for the development of new insurance buying experiences. This is a trend that is likely to continue as the use of APIs in insurance partnerships continues to grow.
How we made the API Products needed
The traditional way to calculate price and buy the insurance is to add a referral link from partner app to the insurance company’s website. By embedding the buying experience into partner mobile application through APIs, the partner has better control over the user’s interaction with the offer that can both improve the buying experience and increase conversions. To accomplish this, we produced a baby insurance API solution consisting of three distinct API products that are called sequentially:
List Coverages API — returns a list of baby insurance coverage items which can be used to describe the content of various coverages in the user interface
Get Price API — calculates the price for a baby insurance
Buy API — completes the purchase after strong authentication based on coverage, pricing, contact and other relevant details
Using the 3 API products the process of developing embedded “mini web shop” experience from scratch within the partner mobile app required a thorough adherence to legal, security, technical, and business requirements.
At the start of the development journey, the API producer team responsible for baby insurance was new to the process how the APIs should be produced and deployed to If API platform¹. Fortunately, there is a supporting process called Production Assessment Process aka PAP², which outlines the necessary steps and guidelines for internal business and development teams producing new API Products.
The first step was to start preparing API information models through collaboration with the business team, API architect, and the development team. Next, we defined the architecture and began implementation, working closely with our partner’s development team to align with UX and content design needs. And finally, we were able to start onboarding the partner to If’s Developer Portal³.
The onboarding journey
If follows a common process to onboard external new API consumers as shown below. The API discovery phase in this case was not needed as the API Products were completely new, and they were released through the If Developer portal to the partner just before the application development started. However, a start-up meeting was held between If’s and partner’s teams to walk through API use cases, start legal work to establish API agreements, register the APIs in the API platform and initiate sketching of initial UI/UX design.
After the API producing team was ready, the initial APIs were made available in the API consumer test environment via If’s API platform. Now the partner was able to start the development and consume the APIs. In practice this meant onboarding the API Partner to the If Developer portal and providing access to test data by setting up relevant authentication types for each API. The API endpoints were made available through the If API Developer portal, including our external Identity Provider (Curity) endpoints for OAuth authentication.
During the application development phase one of the most challenging aspects was implementing and testing strong authentication using BankID for iOS and Android mobile applications to consume the Buy API. Via Signicat, If provides ready-made solution for all Nordic banks so there is no need for the partner to spend time on deciding how to authenticate users. In this case integration to all Finnish BankID solutions were provided with code + PKCE flow illustrated below. If Insurance IAM solution can easily be integrated to web and mobile apps and extended depending on different country and authentication type needs.
Review of API Consumer’s application
The last step in the development journey is the application review to make sure everything is ok before going live. This happens by carrying out an IAM (Identity and Access Management) assessment, followed by API consumer application review meeting. The intention of reviewing applications that use If’s API/Event Product(s), is to protect If’s and the partner’s brand, reputation, and data. The application is reviewed by API Product manager, API Platform team and other relevant stakeholders. This is to verify customer experience, security, legal, technical, and other aspects are verified before deployment to production.
The learnings are used to scale API Product development
Just before the end of the year 2022, we launched the new baby insurance API solution in Finland. During the API development journey, it became obvious that both API producers and API consumers need extensive support from the organization to navigate at the intersection of IT, legal, business and design. Just before the launch, I moved to a newly established API support team to do exactly that and provide hands-on support for both internal and external API customers, in order to make their API development journeys as smooth as possible. APIs in insurance partnerships are key enablers in the future for new innovations, business models and customer experience. However, the key to developing successful API solutions is to have a supporting team, guiding processes, proper tooling and documentation easily available.
Questions or comments? Send us an email
[1]: Elisabeth Falck. (February 12, 2021). APIs for Better Insurance Experiences
https://medium.com/if-tech/apis-for-better-insurance-experiences-e1875dd785b0
[2]: Anders Angstrom. (May 5, 2021). Did You Remember Everything Before Deploying to Production?
https://medium.com/if-tech/did-you-remember-everything-before-deploying-to-production-facde5a2c017
[3]: If Developer Portal. https://developer.if-insurance.com/
