Inside AXA Brazil’s integration COE: How IBM’s webMethods stack helped this insurer expose APIs at scale

Paris-based AXA Group operates in nearly 60 countries with around 150,000 employees. Its Brazil division, AXA Brazil, serves South America’s most populous country. Its portfolio spans microinsurance for mobile phones and consumer goods to complex commercial and fleet products. The business covers a wide range of risks across both B2B and B2C models.

To orchestrate customer journeys that often require real-time assistance and to meet emerging financial regulatory requirements, AXA Brazil embarked on a transformation of its integration layer. The team consolidated fragmented development work into a dedicated Center of Excellence (COE) and standardized on IBM webMethods® Hybrid Integration to securely expose APIs to partners and distribution channels at scale.

The platform has grown both on the outside and inside. Externally, it now handles tens of millions of transactions with availability approaching 99.99%. Internally, this improvement reflects stronger engineering practices. With fewer incidents to manage, employee satisfaction has risen across the integration team.

The COE structure enabled by IBM supports faster, simpler connectivity across AXA Brazil’s business units, partner ecosystems and development teams.

AXA Brazil operates in a market where insurance is becoming both more open and more immediate. Brazil’s Open Insurance initiative (OPIN) is pushing carriers to expose secure, consent-based APIs and return competitive quotes in near real time, while customer expectations are rising for high-touch services like roadside assistance to work instantly—often through multiple partners. Together, these pressures turn speed, reliability and governance into core product capabilities, not just IT concerns.

Launched in 2021, Brazil’s OPIN initiative has shifted power to policyholders, who can now authorize data sharing across insurers and financial institutions in exchange for faster, more competitive offers. That shift has placed heavy technical demands on financial services providers like AXA Brazil: expose well-governed APIs, integrate tightly with regulators and partners and respond in seconds rather than minutes.

OPIN standardizes the secure, consent-based sharing of customer insurance policy, claim and risk data through APIs. The goal is to foster innovation, a competitive ecosystem and highly personalized insurance products by:

• Exposing APIs that regulators and competitors can consume
• Collecting and normalizing external data from other insurers
• Responding to quotation requests fast enough to be competitive in aggregator and marketplace flows

In this environment, the speed of your infrastructure really matters. If one carrier’s quotation appears even tens of seconds later than a competitor’s, the opportunity might already be lost.

Beyond regulatory compliance and quoting, AXA Brazil focused on a high-stakes use case: real-time assistance when something goes wrong on the road.

The end-to-end journey looks roughly like this:

1. A driver experiences a breakdown or accident and stops on the roadside
2. The driver initiates contact by chat, phone or messaging with AXA Brazil
3. AXA’s systems validate the policy, coverage and eligibility against a central policy data store
4. If coverage is valid, AXA orchestrates multiple actions through APIs, such as dispatching a tow truck or assistance provider and issuing a ride-sharing voucher (for example, with a partner such as Uber) so the customer can arrange a ride instantly
5. AXA coordinates notifications across the customer, the assistance provider and internal operations

From the customer’s perspective, this experience is a seamless one: a single conversation that leads to a car being collected and a ride home arranged. Internally, it becomes a choreography of policy lookup, eligibility checks, partner selection and voucher issuance across multiple systems and companies.

To make these kinds of complex journeys work at scale—across B2B fleet products, B2C micro-insurance and open-insurance comparison sites—AXA needed:

• Fast, reliable APIs that can mediate between internal systems, partners and regulatory platforms
• A consistent integration architecture instead of siloed, one-off-point integrations built inside individual squads
• Strong governance and security aligned with Brazil’s open insurance standards and the broader open finance ecosystem
• Operational excellence on availability and latency, given that many journeys happen under stress and time pressure
• Cost efficiency scaling to handle growing transaction volumes without linear cost increases

The team aligned on several design principles for the new integration platform:

• API-first integration with industry-standard REST and file-based patterns
• Robustness and scalability to handle high transaction volume from multiple lines of business and channels
• Security and governance by design, not bolted on per project
• Centralized integration expertise through a COE, replacing scattered, squad-local implementations

At the core of the architecture is IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration, which provides integration and API management capabilities for exposing and governing APIs.

IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration provides a unified control plane for integration patterns—including APIs, applications, B2B and files—and is designed to support hybrid and multicloud deployments. AXA Brazil needed consistent, reliable and cost-effective API management that fosters security, governance and innovation, built on a market-leading platform.

In the image of AXA’s high-level architecture, data sources are on the right and data consumers on the left. Distribution channels range from AXA portals to third-party service providers. The integration layer and API layer includes:

• IBM webMethods Integration Server instances orchestrate flows between channels, core systems and external partners
• IBM webMethods API Gateway governs and exposes APIs for open insurance and regulatory interfaces, external partners (for example, ride-sharing, logistics, marketplaces), and internal consumers such as mobile apps and portals
• A standardized API catalog and policies enforce authentication, rate limiting, logging and compliance

The core systems include policy administration, billing, claims and customer data systems and a consolidated data layer that acts as the “one source of truth” for policy and coverage checks. Finally, the operations and governance layer includes:

• Multi-environment setup with dedicated development, test and production landscapes on robust on-premises hardware
• Monitoring and incident management that help maintain availability close to 99.99% over tens of millions of transactions
• Governance tooling (for example, work management and code review processes) to coordinate releases and reduce integration defects

Currently, the integration and API management stack runs on premises, a strategic choice driven by:

• Tight control over SLAs and latency, aided by local infrastructure and in-house operations teams.
• Predictable cost structure tied to server and processor capacity rather than per-transaction pricing, enabling AXA Brazil to grow volumes without a proportional increase in licensing costs.

At the same time, AXA Brazil interacts daily with SaaS components and is evaluating IBM marketing leading cloud-based hybrid offerings for webMethods, as the platform evolves toward microservices and container-based deployments.

Much of this project’s success was organizational and cultural rather than purely technical. Rather than allowing integration work to remain fragmented across individual squads, the IBM webMethods stack helped AXA Brazil establish a formal COE with a clear mandate and centralized ownership.

Previously, silos, inconsistent practices and limited governance fragmented integration efforts. Architects and developers were spread across squads, with little alignment on standards or long-term platform direction. The COE brought these roles together under unified leadership, combining new architectural capabilities with existing developers. It also created shared accountability for integration design, delivery quality and platform evolution.

The COE introduced consistent standards for API design, security and logging, supported by regular but lightweight governance cadences. Weekly and monthly reviews, shared code standards and defined reuse patterns improved predictability without burdening delivery teams. Tooling coordinated work and increased transparency, allowing leadership to support developers rather than introduce unnecessary processes.

This structure emphasized enablement over control. By centralizing expertise and encouraging reuse of shared lessons and patterns, the COE created an environment where teams were able to learn and improve together. Over nearly three years, this approach raised integration platform maturity from level 1 (“initial”) to level 3 on AXA’s internal scale, where 5 represents “optimized”. It also introduced formalized governance and documented processes that are now shared across teams.

The COE is already delivering measurable results, including fewer incidents and improved operational efficiency, with trends indicating continued reductions in support tickets through 2025.

The integration modernization delivered several concrete outcomes:

• High availability at scale: Over recent years, AXA Brazil processed more than 40 million transactions with availability approaching four nines. From January through May 2025 alone, the platform handled 22 million transactions with four-nines reliability and a four-hour average resolution time.
• Low response times where it matters most: API response times are kept low enough to support real-time open-insurance quoting and real-time customer assistance, where a delay of seconds can change the outcome.
• Improved engineering maturity and reuse: Shared components and patterns reduce redundant integrations, cutting time to onboard new partners.
• Better cost efficiency: An on-premises licensing model based on server capacity allows AXA Brazil to optimize performance and avoid per-transaction cost spikes.

For end customers and brokers, the technical work translates into tangible improvements:

• Faster, more competitive offers in open insurance journeys, as AXA can consume and respond to standardized ecosystem data with low latency
• Real-time roadside assistance that coordinates claims, towing and ride-sharing in a single workflow, reducing stress during incidents
• More seamless omnichannel experiences, with the same underlying APIs serving portals, marketplaces and partner channels

This API-centric operating model supports the overall goals of open insurance—greater transparency, customer control of data and more personalized products.

AXA Brazil has turned operational challenges into an opportunity to standardize its integration landscape and strengthen its technology core. By consolidating integrations within a dedicated COE and adopting IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration, the organization now operates a high-availability, low-latency platform. This platform supports tens of millions of transactions and orchestrates complex, multi-partner customer journeys.

The architectural choices made—on-premises deployment for tight SLA and cost control, API-first patterns, strong governance and a unified integration team—position the platform to evolve toward hyperautomation. As IBM expands webMethods and related offerings with its data and AI portfolio, insurers like AXA Brazil gain a path to incorporate AI-driven orchestration, advanced monitoring and agent-based automation. They can do so without rebuilding the foundation.

By building on IBM’s integration and API management stack, AXA Brazil can now extend its platform into new products, partners and automation scenarios. This approach allows the company to follow customers into new journeys without reimplementing the core each time, while delivering more resilient, real-time experiences when they matter most.

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