For years, local insurance agents helped insurers build trust by developing relationships with their customers. Though those relationships are still critical, today’s customers are much more likely to open a mobile app than they are to telephone their local agents when they need to make a claim. That means that today’s insurance companies must develop digital networks that are exceedingly fast and reliable.

Anadolu Sigorta is Turkey’s oldest insurance company. It offers a wide variety of insurance products, including vehicle, homeowners, travel, health and more. In the 95 years since its inception, Anadolu Sigorta’s network has grown to include a wide variety of business relationships.

For example, Anadolu Sigorta has a partnership with Isbank, which operates approximately 1,300 branches. There are also approximately 2,500 Anadolu Sigorta agencies, 800 of which are large enough to merit their own CRM solutions. And Anadolu Sigorta’s products are listed with several insurance aggregators, which offer potential customers an easy way to compare insurers.

Anadolu Sigorta chose IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration on the Red Hat® OpenShift® platform to help integrate all of these business-critical systems. The solution also features the IBM API Connect® platform and the IBM® DataPower® Gateway appliance. Together, these products help ensure that Anadolu Sigorta’s integrations are secure, flexible and highly available—all key components in a trustworthy system. The IBM Event Streams service rounds out the solution, helping ensure that Anadolu Sigorta and its partners can respond to events as they happen.

The solution doesn’t just build trust among Anadolu Sigorta’s customers—it also helps solidify partner relationships by simplifying the process of integrating applications. Ismail Özeren, Chief Architect at Anadolu Sigorta, explains: “In the past, we had to email them, write them, send them sample code and talk to them on the phone. The process now is simple: we just send the developer a username and password. They can see all of the documentation and try the services themselves online.”

The elegance of these integrations shows itself in many different areas of Anadolu Sigorta’s business. For example, when a health insurance customer walks into a network hospital, the system at the front desk is integrated directly into Anadolu Sigorta’s system. The policyholder’s visit is automatically approved without any need to log in to Anadolu Sigorta’s system.

Vehicle policyholders, too, can enjoy this type of experience with Anadolu Sigorta. When a customer wants to buy a new policy or make a change to an existing policy, Anadolu Sigorta’s app can process that request in 10–12 seconds.

Anadolu Sigorta also offers customers an app that allows them to photograph receipts for products or services that their policies cover. The system then automatically processes the receipt, and in many cases deposits refunded money directly into the customer’s bank account.