Bringing New Insurance Products to Market

CUNA Mutual Group has trusted MentorMate with its software needs since February 2016. Over the years, we’ve worked with CUNA Mutual Group’s innovation group H3IC to test the viability and bring multiple consumer-centric financial products to life. Some of the projects we’ve worked on include the job loss insurance platform SafetyNet and the round-up savings product Cookie Jar. 

When CUNA Mutual Group decided to develop a first-of-its-kind pet insurance product, they again chose MentorMate as their technical partner to make it happen. With Bivvy, the company aimed to make buying pet insurance more affordable and less complicated than other products on the market. 

Streamlining Pet Insurance

We worked with CUNA Mutual Group to determine how best to achieve its business objectives with Bivvy. We designed and built a multi-payment provider, responsive .NET website that could easily take secure monthly payments from customers. It also has a built-in rules engine, the ability to create customized insurance documents in real-time, and an admin portal for the Bivvy customer service team to evaluate and pay out claims.

Working Smarter and More Efficiently

CUNA Mutual Group takes a lean startup approach with its H3IC work that allows them to fail fast, learn quickly, and adapt as needed to bring new insurance products to market in a timely manner. With that approach in mind, we opted to adapt the existing SafetyNet platform for Bivvy rather than build something entirely from scratch. Since both Bivvy and SafetyNet are insurance products, many of the elements and functionality transferred from one platform to the other with some minor tweaks. 

Bivvy first launched in the fall of 2018 and was a huge success. Since the initial launch, we transitioned the platform to a more robust Microsoft Azure cloud environment with an Umbraco .NET content management system (CMS) to handle the increased demand.

Accounting for Continued Success

Since Bivvy first launched, it’s grown from a startup to a full-scale insurance platform that services tens of thousands of customers in over 40 states. To date, Bivvy has paid out millions in claims to policyholders who found themselves in financial need due to unexpected pet expenses. As noted above, an impact on the platform itself was the need to upgrade the infrastructure to handle the traffic demands that came with Bivvy’s success.