RAC Insurance

CDL

The RAC is a top-five UK car insurance broker, having exceeded the 650,000 policies-in-force milestone in 2020 and generating over 44 million quotes. It provides customers with great value insurance by searching a panel of carefully selected insurers to get the best possible prices.

Its portfolio of products includes car, multi-car, learner, classic car, motorbike, van, home, travel, business and technology-led car insurance products such as monthly subscription Pay by Mile, launched in 2021, and Black Box telematics.

With an ambition to exceed £300m gross written premiums (GWP) by 2023, the RAC determined to launch an in-house broking operation to give it greater control of its insurance business. To achieve this, it required its own insurance retail platform with the resilience, scalability and digital capabilities that would enable it to meet its growth and innovation targets.

Data insight, product personalisation and customer engagement were all identified as key requirements to enable the business to differentiate its propositions and drive business growth moving forward.

RAC Insurance chose CDL's Strata platform as a proven high volume retail solution that would deliver both the operational efficiency to enable profitable growth and the ability to offer modern consumer engagement models within a wider insurance ecosystem.

Strata supports insurance providers to bring products to market using a multi-channel strategy via a single database. Its components enable the sale and administration of policies, including telematics-based insurance, via the web, price comparison sites, contact center, mobile and voice devices.

Used by some of the UK's largest personal lines providers, the system generates millions of transactions each day, making AWS the ideal cloud-hosting platform to deliver the resilience and scalability required to handle these volumes.

With Differentiated Software Partner status in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN), CDL has a strong track record in deploying Strata on AWS. Ways in which AWS is leveraged for RAC Insurance include:

By setting up its own broker operation using CDL Strata, RAC was able to take direct control of key parts of the value chain, gaining far greater ability to differentiate its propositions and pricing to unlock the significant growth potential it sees in personal lines insurance.

Strata's integration within a wider ecosystem gives access to a powerful data and analytics platform, enabling RAC to leverage its pricing models and work with insurer partners to utilise RAC's wealth of unique data assets to improve risk selection and offer customers much more competitive prices. This is enabling it to achieve the innovation in pricing and data, which is central to RAC's plans for the new broker.

The move to Strata on AWS also enables RAC to offer consumers a sophisticated digital experience with simpler, more intuitive journeys and high levels of self-service to purchase and manage policies online, including making mid-term adjustments.

"We were really impressed by the Strata system and the digital capabilities CDL were able to offer. They have strong experience in the aggregator-led personal lines space and the big players in the market use them, with insurers turning to CDL as their 'first port of call' to update products and ratings. The scalability and resilience delivered by AWS cloud-hosting was a key element of CDL's proposition and the suitability of Strata to meet our growth aspirations."

Marcus Latchford, Head of RAC Insurance

March 2021

• Overview
• Strata
• Hummingbird
• Proteus
• Kingfisher
• Vehicle Information Services