Gamalife is a leading life insurance company in Portugal. Its decades-old integration infrastructure—inherited from the traditional bank which originally owned it—was no longer fit for purpose. Data was held in silos across the organization, core data was locked into a legacy platform and there were security issues with exposing data securely to third parties.

“Our core legacy platform as programmed on RPG and wasn’t up to the sort of modern integration we needed,” says Rui Pinto, Head of IT at Gamalife. “My team and I were getting more and more worried about vulnerabilities, not to mention the need to future-proof access to data in an ecosystem economy. It was time to act.”

The company needed a flexible integration platform as a service (iPaaS) combined with a Managed File Transfer capability and API management so they could securely expose data to partners and distributors. This would help them offer new solutions in the digital distribution of insurance as a service.

Furthermore, the solution had to be compliant with the demanding requirements of a heavily regulated financial sector. It was vital the company could maintain a complete overview of every communication and call made and received, as well as a record of all requests, both internal and external.

The value of experience

After talking to competitors, Gamalife chose a solution from Software AG’s local partner Findmore Digital, who recommended a solution based on webMethods.

“We selected Software AG and Findmore Digital because they had recently completed a similar project with a carve-out from the same bank we did—a non-life insurance company here in Portugal,” says Rui, “and we knew the results had been spectacular.”

The partner, supplier and customer got down to work. All the integrations between internal applications and between the company and our partners were transformed, without the need to touch the applications. This allowed us to make this evolution faster, safer and with less impact. As Rui explains, this offers his security team a significant advantage: “The architecture of the webMethods platform helps isolate specific areas to prevent breaches, and all communication is from inside to outside. That gives security a better view of traffic and makes it easier for us to expose our data securely.”

Everything they wanted. And more.

Gamalife's new webMethods.io Integration Platform is now up and running, providing services for all types of use, internal and external, streamlining the business and increasing the possibilities for the future evolution of the other platforms. And, as Rui says, the investment is proving to be even more valuable than the company considered at the start of the project. See what the company is doing with its new MFT solution:

“We anticipated three or four use cases for webMethods ActiveTransfer, but we soon saw it had so much more potential than we realized to increase the flow of data within our company, and with it the quality of services we offer. For example, we used to use a third-party service provider for customer statements and other documents, which involved generating and sending them thousands of .xml files every month. But now that whole process is automated.“

And while Gamalife is already reaping the rewards of its investment, things are set to really take off in the next phase.

This is just the beginning

"webMethods is based on open standards and has a thriving Developer Portal, so we're excited about what's to come," says Rui. "We're looking to develop new services so that our partners, in this case distributors, can serve our customers with more features and offer a better experience. The aim is to be ever closer to the customer."

Gamalife’s data is comprehensively protected by webMethods API management, a robust solution for managing their API portfolio. As well as offering rate limiting and gateway access policies to protect API resources, it gives the company advanced analytics to enforce authorization and security by using OAuth and other authentication methods, together with modern encryption standards. Traffic monitoring optimizes run-time performance conditions, enforces limits for service invocations, and sends alerts whenever conditions are violated. In addition, it makes it easy to conduct penetration tests to check for vulnerabilities.

“The whole process has been very smooth so far, and there have been no delays,” says Rui. “Believe me, that’s very rare. We worked together as a single team, and I’m confident Software AG and Findmore will be able to deliver this important next phase.”