API management to streamline the customer's journey

You joined SPB as CIO six months ago, what is your view on the digital transformation of brokers?
When it comes to building a policyholder's customer journey in the context of affinity insurance programmes, IT juggles an imperative with an imponderable. The imperative is customer satisfaction. As Europe's leading provider of affinity insurance and services, SPB promises its partners a seamless end-to-end experience, a more emotional attachment to the brand. The imponderable, which our sales and marketing department works on, consists of changes in market trends and factors that influence loyalty.

Responding to increasingly demanding customer-satisfaction requirements in a context of permanent change requires an extremely flexible IT system and constant interaction with our commercial and technical partners (key accounts, insurers and service providers). And this is my mission at SPB.

What are the benefits for customers?
More automation and therefore more fluidity and agility! We are increasingly using APIs (Application Programming Interface). This makes it easier to build extranets and enhances our partners' customer experience. We build digital journeys in kit form, integrating the customer-journey bricks that are most in line with our partners' expectations.

It is important to give our partners a choice. Thanks to a whole catalogue of standardised APIs that we offer, the partner also builds the customer's journey independently and in line with its marketing strategy. Of course, if this is not possible, SPB builds the partner an extranet with these same APIs and in consultation with its marketing teams. This greater freedom in the construction of journeys ensures more control over the customer's experience.

In addition, APIs provide better interoperability with our partners' systems and our own systems. Regardless of the path taken by a policyholder (extranet, partner's IS, phone, etc.), APIs will pool the resources committed to information systems and ensure the stability of the customer journey.

Lastly, because they are dedicated to a single functionality (membership, uploading of supporting documents, electronic signature, etc.), APIs give greater flexibility to the customer journeys they generate. This means that whenever a change to a functionality is required, we only need to change the related API rather than the entire process code.

What are the next steps?
We are continuing our digital transformation and this also involves a change in culture and mindset, and we are convinced that API management has an important role to play. We are always looking for ways to be closer to our partners. Because of their potential and flexibility, APIs are shaking up the relationship that policyholders have with the brand. Far from being limited to a technical or operational subject, APIs are a marketing lever that SPB is using to offer more and more value to its partners.