Navigating industry shifts with IBM webMethods

Since its founding in 1987, Clal Insurance has risen to become a top insurance and financial services company. The company built its reputation on embracing innovation and digital transformation early on, earning industry recognition and awards along the way.

However, the past decade brought challenges that even the forward-thinking insurers couldn’t have anticipated. Clal Insurance found itself weathering a perfect storm: a global financial crisis, aggressive regulatory changes and the challenge of operating in a low-to-zero-interest-rate environment.

These pressures created an urgent new reality. The company needed to maintain strict compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) or risk facing hefty fines. They had to achieve the kind of agility that could help the company compete with emerging insurtechs. More importantly, they needed to drastically reduce the time to market for their products and services.

It became clear that Clal needed more than incremental improvements; they needed transformation. And they needed a trusted partner who could deliver the right solution at the right moment. With the IBM® webMethods Hybrid Integration platform, Clal found the technological foundation they were looking for.

With their basic integration platform now in place, Clal focused on the next challenge: replacing their existing third-party system. And they had to do this quickly because Clal was rapidly approaching a breaking point on multiple fronts.

The company faced the very real threats of SLA compliance issues, millions in potential fines and even the possibility of losing licenses due to missed deadlines. Their legacy systems struggled to respond to small requests within a month, couldn’t handle increasing data transfer volumes and made parallel processing nearly impossible.

"The status quo cost our team and our company time, money and nerves!" says Haim Inger, Chief Technology Officer at Clal Insurance Enterprise Holdings Ltd.

Working closely with the IBM webMethods team, Clal created seamless internal and external connectivity and file transfer capabilities across all formats and systems. The results were transformative: drastically reduced time-to-market for regulatory changes, parallel processing that increased output and improved SLAs, and system availability that reached an impressive 99.9999 percent, significantly boosting the company’s overall resilience.

The strategic shift proved to be perfectly timed for Clal as the insurance industry faced years of market turbulence ahead.

“No one can accurately predict the onset of a financial crisis,” note Heim Inger. “That's why it's essential for a company like ours to remain vigilant—without sacrificing growth or the expansion of new services.”

Adopting IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration was the logical choice for Clal. With this platform, the company integrated more than 100 different applications with over 1,000 running instances, which helped them respond to over 100 legislative changes annually while providing common APIs, services and standardized development practices.

What’s remarkable is the fact that accomplishing these updates through traditional methods would have required more than 100 years of work.  Instead of merely surviving, Clal took significant measures to thrive in an increasingly complex regulatory and competitive industry.

Clal Insurance Enterprise Holdings Ltd. is an award-winning insurance and asset management group. Founded in 1987, the company has rapidly grown to 4,200 employees and 1,500 agents through innovative insurance and savings products. The company is a leading life, health and general insurer and a leading digital innovator.