Staying agile even after seven mergers
Established in 1808, Fidelidade has grown through multiple mergers and acquisitions. However, as its business grew, the group faced a significant challenge in consolidating brands, channels, technologies, and applications.
One major barrier was that the business logic of numerous legacy applications was hardwired into monolithic systems and mainframes.
"We needed a new architectural approach to deliver modern, omnichannel solutions to our customers," said Teresa Rosas, Head of IT. "We needed to have the underlying concepts of our business well-structured to create core capabilities that we could reuse across channels. That's a much leaner approach than trying to solve these concepts in channel silos."
But that wasn’t the only challenge. With a vast mixture of technologies to replace, Fidelidade would have to train 200+ IT people in new technology and development standards, representing an enormous investment. That’s when Fidelidade began to evaluate OutSystems.
"We had a complex governance to work with. We needed to develop core capabilities and publish them in different channels while creating a modern journey for our customers. In other words, we needed to become an agile business. And OutSystems enabled exactly that."
Fidelidade transitions over 100 developers to OutSystems
Fidelidade chose OutSystems in 2008. Crucial aspects of that evaluation included:
- Accelerated delivery to meet business needs quickly.
- A short learning curve to speed up the transition of 100+ developers.
- Compatibility of existing systems with the new platform.
- Seamless integration and extension of Fidelidade's systems using a REST architecture.
- Compatibility with open standards—particularly .NET—to allow all layers of applications to be extended with Fidelidade's own code.
"We are a merger of several companies, so we have a lot of systems and complex applications, and OutSystems makes a difference in this scenario. We use it to develop all front-end integration applications, mobile apps, and end-to-end applications."
By consolidating most of its enterprise application development on OutSystems, Fidelidade's IT organization implemented a highly reusable software architecture with core capabilities that it can publish across channels. Teresa shared: "We've gained a significant agility advantage. We're driving a customer-centric IT strategy at scale because we can implement omnichannel experiences for customers and agents more quickly and with less technical debt."
Examples of how Fidelidade can deliver these connected customer journeys include seamlessly moving from a mobile app request or a web portal simulation to a related experience with a contact center, network agent, or sales team.
So far, the insurer has delivered over 80 products—from internal operations to critical customer-facing apps—and 800 reusable business modules. To highlight:
"Fidelidade is recognized for the way we manage claims. We have a very high client satisfaction rate. The claims features, available in MyFidelidade, have a clear and direct contribution to our client satisfaction."
A customer-centric IT strategy that scales
With OutSystems, Fidelidade can now work in a much more agile way. Development teams can iterate faster thanks to a shared common language, shorter sprints, and speedier user feedback.
And there's plenty of evidence that this strategy is succeeding. Several brands within the group have consistently been awarded in their markets: Multicare was identified as a "Top-of-mind brand for excellence" by consumers; ok! seguros has been awarded "Most Reputable Direct Insurance Company" for three years, and its AutoDigital app won an Innovation Award for its transformative customer experience.
"It’s not just about speeding up development; OutSystems empowers us to compete regionally and globally and stay ahead of other insurers. It's a game-changer."
Summarizing the benefits of its newfound agility, Fidelidade points to the following results:
- Delivering a customer-centric strategy at scale: With around 60 web apps and 15 mobile apps that serve over two million customers and 8,000 agents, plus accompanying internal apps that boost operational efficiency.
- Sales growth: With increased up-sell and cross-sell, supported by digital self-service apps like MyFidelidade portals and mobile apps.
- Faster innovation: Fidelidade's IT team can now spend more time on business innovation and less time on maintenance.
- Extra adaptability and resilience: Fidelidade can quickly and reliably change business processes that were previously hardwired inside legacy systems.
- Retain IP ownership and control: Thanks to the OutSystems visual/self-documented approach to development, Fidelidade has better control of its intellectual property, even when it needs to outsource some development.
- Increased IT productivity: 40+ development teams deliver new digital initiatives up to six times faster.
- Faster onboarding of new developers: IT staff from different backgrounds can now ramp up and develop with OutSystems quickly.
- Faster external staff augmentation: The IT department can now cost-effectively outsource maintenance projects previously kept in-house. A new team can take over an OutSystems app in only three days, a significant benefit of self-documenting visual development.
- Increased number of projects delivered: The number of development projects that IT can manage has grown dramatically. Fidelidade has over 100 OutSystems developers and over 80 digital products managed by the OutSystems low-code platform.
- Reduced technical debt: The merged companies of Fidelidade had dozens of systems and a massive technical debt challenge. By unifying development on OutSystems, Fidelidade has been able to reuse core capabilities shared across 80 apps and multiple channels while increasing adoption by customers and employees.
"We found in OutSystems the bricks to bridge the gap between business and IT. We can now respond to the company's strategy and face the challenges of innovation head-on. It’s our main strategic platform."