Accelerating the RSA’s digital transformation for the More Than brand

The Challenge

Work with RSA to deliver key components of its ambitious digital transformation, driving better customer and business outcomes. These included the rebuild of its flagship Morethan.com website, championing agile working, implementing automated testing and building a fully automated release pipeline to accelerate deliveries and minimise risk.

RSA is one of the longest-established insurers in the world, and its More Than brand is among the UK’s most well-known in the home, pet and motor product lines. RSA also underwrites insurance for numerous big-name partner organisations. For each of these, RSA creates a unique digital buying journey that seamlessly aligns with the partner’s brand.

RSA has ambitious aims to transform the offering for its customers and partner businesses, and provide an industry-leading experience. To support this, it had embarked on a digital transformation, which seeks to:

• Increase sales, by improving customer experiences
• Enable more time to be spent developing value-added services and capabilities for its customers, by enhancing operational efficiency
• Mature its digital capability, by creating a function that blends in-house and external expertise to deliver best-in-class services to the business and its partners

As part of this programme, RSA brought in Softwire. We worked closely with the insurer to define where and how we could best support it on its transformation journey. This included:

• Building the new flagship Morethan.com website, ensuring it reflected the brand’s premium feel
• Designing and building the More Than quote-and-buy journeys, starting with motor insurance
• Implementing a design system for More Than, to accelerate the subsequent delivery of its pet and home insurance buying journeys, and make the site simpler to maintain
• Creating a modern component library, to enable different parts of the RSA portfolio to be built more rapidly and benefit from an upfront investment in usability and accessibility. This would free RSA teams to spend more time crafting unique branded journeys for each partner
• Collaborating with RSA’s digital and DevOps teams to evolve their ways of working, increase agility and transition to a cloud-based technology stack for all RSA websites

Our Solution

We built the new Morethan.com website and motor insurance quote-and-buy journey, as well as a scalable cloud architecture and library of reusable components.

In parallel, we worked closely with RSA to mature its in-house capabilities, drawing on our digital transformation expertise from the financial services sector and beyond.

Morethan.com and motor insurance quote-and-buy journey

As part of the delivery of MoreThan.com and the motor quote-and-buy journey, we co-designed the technical architecture with RSA, using the cloud for its inherent scalability.

Moreover, we chose technologies to ensure the site was straightforward to maintain and enhance. Key among these was the Contentstack content management system. This separates straightforward content changes from functional improvements that require deployment and testing.

As well as giving the respective RSA teams more flexibility in their day-to-day work, it means content updates can now be made within hours, and with virtually zero risk of impacting the technical working of the site.

Design system and component library

As part of the development of the motor insurance quote-and-buy journey, we implemented the design system for More Than. This included a set of fluid grid layouts to enable the sites to be consistently styled in line with RSA’s design guidelines across desktop, tablet and mobile.

We also built a library of more than 100 reusable components, such as date-pickers and drop-down menus. We did this using Storybook, which gives RSA’s designers a centralised overview of everything available, and details of each component’s capabilities.

Embedding best-practice ways of working

Over time, we worked increasingly closely with RSA’s teams, helping the business implement a variety of digital delivery best practices aimed at improving product quality and increasing efficiency.

For example, we’ve ensured riskier tasks are brought forward in delivery schedules, enabling teams to proactively identify how to address them, and thereby keep projects on-track. We also embedded enhanced quality assurance (QA) within the agile delivery process, such that this is taken care of by the development team during each sprint.

This involves closer collaboration between developers, testers and product owners, and eliminates the need for long testing phases at the end of each delivery. In-sprint testing includes extensive automated unit and integration tests, component tests, accessibility checks and peer review.

In addition, the continuous integration pipelines we’ve implemented have enabled RSA to roll out the new operating model we touched on above, where content and functionality changes are deployed independently of one another. We also moved to a ‘blue-green’ deployment approach, enabling zero-downtime rollout of new functionality, coupled with instant-rollback capability if needed.

The Result

The new Morethan.com has seen a 350% rise in organic traffic from search engines, users are spending longer on the site, and more people are buying policies. Meanwhile, partners benefit from more-tailored services, and the maturity of RSA’s digital capabilities has been fast-tracked.

The new Morethan.com website and motor insurance buying journey are both live and have had an immediate impact on the business.

Jen Dallas, Head of Digital UK&I at RSA, explains: “Since its launch, Morethan.com has seen search-engine-optimised traffic grow year-on-year by 350%, and average time-on-site has increased as well. So in addition to bringing more people to the site, they’re more engaged when they get here.

“Since launching the new motor insurance quote-and-buy journey, we’ve seen increases in conversion: more people are buying our policies as a result of the changes we’ve made with Softwire.”

A better experience for partners and their customers

The positive impact of the component library has also been felt. Dallas continues: “Recent work has shown we’re about 60% more efficient when it comes to design, meaning we can focus more time on offering each partner a more tailored and strategic service.”

A transformed digital team

Dallas concludes by reflecting on the wider impact our team has had: “Softwire has been a hugely valuable partner, pushing us forward and helping us mature into a more rounded digital function than we would have been without them.

“In particular, the way Softwire ensured we mitigate risks by tackling the really crunchy questions at the start of any process, has been really valuable in giving me priceless confidence that we’ll be able to deliver for the business.

“Overall, we love working with Softwire. They’re so helpful and go out of their way to support us.”