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David Wesdijk wants to be the disruptor in the insurance industry, just like Uber is for the taxi world and Netflix turned video watching upside down. But speed and agility require a modern, high-quality technical basis. He found it in the Novulo platform. The insurance industry is in need of modernization, David Wesdijk saw when he looked at it from his retail experience. Insurance companies have become cumbersome and inflexible through mergers and acquisitions. In January 2022, he started developing the ideas he had come up with in the four years before. He set up a new company called Maia. The name comes from the language of the Maori, the native inhabitants of New Zealand. It means “confident”, but also “self-insured”. That's what Wesdijk wants: let entrepreneurs decide online what they want to insure and how.
In just five months, he and the team built the back-end and portal for Maia and was able to go live on January 1, 2023. “It was a unique opportunity to start with a blank sheet and do things differently.”
Insurance involves many different processes, including customer acceptance, policy administration, premium collection, payment transactions, policy changes, claims analysis, fraud prevention and compliance. Many insurers all have different systems for this. Nevertheless, it is necessary to be able to exchange the data from all those applications. So connections are being made. But this makes the whole thing inflexible, unstable and difficult to maintain.
Wesdijk says he couldn't have realized his MAIA approach without the Novulo platform, at least not so quickly. “I looked at other solutions beforehand, existing proven system house software. But being able to develop something myself with programming quality standards made my tech heart beat faster.”
More than three quarters of the required functionality matched the components in the Novulo catalog. The rest had to be built by the MAIA team themselves or modify modules. “That really gave us a kick-start and I'm really happy about that. Because otherwise, I think we would still not have been operational.”
All functionality is now housed in one platform that is also very flexible. “And we can do this regardless of the agenda of a software house, with dozens or hundreds of customers who also want something. Today, we can decide for ourselves what we want to build.”
Flexibility is necessary in a rapidly changing world. As an example, Wesdijk mentions offering “embedded insurance”, insurances that are offered, for example, by OnderhoudNL, the business organization for specialists in real estate maintenance. “Even if you have nothing to do with insurance, you can still offer insurance via our platform.” Wesdijk also sees a growing role for artificial intelligence in insurance. “The developments are going faster and faster. And I think this gives us a platform with the technical possibilities to respond quickly to market developments. Then you're talking about real agility.”
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