New Ireland Assurance Customer & Broker Portal Qorus Reinvention Awards - Europe 2025 - Winner

The challenge we set for ourselves was ambitious and required a complete reimagining of the customer experience. Traditionally financial advisors, operating face-to-face with customers, were the basis of the Life Assurance industry with no digital self-serve options. This model is underpinned by paper and labour-intensive back-office functions, typically supported by disparate IT systems. This makes the end to end customer journeys from initial customer engagement and onward through the back office to completion quite long, with potentially many human touchpoints and back and forth communications with customers. It’s expensive to deliver, isn’t scalable and is not customer-centric. Traditional face to face meetings also require additional customer effort. Research shows that more than a third of consumers would leave their provider if they didn’t offer more up to date technology, and that digital channels can enable more personalisation, create real-time tools to serve customers and for customers to self-serve. Digital channels also enable experimentation and real-time customer feedback to learn what works for customers (CX Academy CX Report). To deliver on our ambition of delivering really brilliant customer experiences for now and for the future, we explored different digital solutions, partnering with key 3rd party fintechs and leading technology providers whose expertise complements our strengths. We wanted to enable customers engage with us through the channel of their choice, that meets the customers changing requirements and very importantly enables us to adapt quickly as customer preferences and expectations change. Putting the customer experience at the core of our ambition resulted in a completely reimagined customer experience, delivered through a network of key digital platforms and new technologies that we developed with our partners. The result was our Advisor Portal, the digital fulcrum of our customer experiences, around which a number of other ‘satellite’ digital platforms connect, allowing customers engage through different channels how and when they want. A suite of API connectors was constructed to form a single experience layer between all components, centralising the ownership and change governance for the connected journeys, and more importantly create seamless customer transitions as they move through the end to end journey. This was key to delivering the reimagined brilliant and seamless customer experiences we knew our customers sought.