Allianz speeds up case reviews with control

The Business Issue

Like many large enterprises, Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS) had reached a familiar tipping point: its application landscape had grown faster than any one team could easily manage. AGCS’s IT organization was responsible for more than 130 applications, each with its own infrastructure, security requirements, and specialized expertise – and every added layer meant rising maintenance costs, slower adaptation to new regulations, and more risk quietly sitting in outdated systems. Against that backdrop, AGCS also carried a mandate to bring operating costs down by 15–20%.

One of those applications was BIRT — the Business Integrity Review Tool that Allianz’s claims, underwriting, and risk consulting teams relied on to run formal business reviews, a governance control that kept AGCS’s processes auditable and consistent. Before BIRT, that same review process ran on manual, Excel-driven files that varied department to department, so the tool itself was a meaningful step up when AGCS first built it.

But BIRT had become the very problem it was built to solve. Running as a desktop, file-based Eclipse Java application, it couldn’t support more than one reviewer at a time on the same case, forcing teams to coordinate manually outside the tool. Reaching basic data entry took excessive clicks, and even minor feature additions meant lengthy packaging and rollout work. BIRT also covered only the review-execution step of a larger process, leaving planning and stakeholder communication for reviewers to manage elsewhere.

AGCS’s underwriting integrity team valued BIRT’s institutional logic and its role as a governance control – they weren’t looking to replace it with something unfamiliar. They needed to preserve years of embedded review logic while removing the collaboration bottlenecks and rollout costs of an aging desktop application, without the multi-month rebuild that legacy replacement usually demands inside a highly regulated insurance environment.

The Solution

AGCS worked with Accenture and Pega to modernize BIRT through a combined reverse-engineering and forward-engineering approach, so the tool’s existing business logic carried forward instead of starting from a blank page.

A cross-functional team split the work into three capabilities: reverse-engineering specialists analyzed BIRT’s existing rules, flows, and data; architects used Pega Blueprint® to redesign the target-state process and experience; and Pega Platform™ engineers built the result into a secure, production-ready application.

Accenture’s reverse-engineering platform extracted business requirements directly from BIRT’s legacy code and documentation, feeding Pega Blueprint a baseline to reimagine the process from. Every round of AI-generated output – user stories, process flows, data models, test cases – went through SME review before the next iteration, so the modernization stayed grounded in how AGCS’s reviewers actually work.

Before committing to a full build, the team ran a dedicated “test drive” phase with the business to validate the reverse-engineered application against real requirements and surface a short list of long-requested features that had been too costly to add in the old tool. From there, a prototype became a minimum lovable product, and the team layered in the additional governance and security steps AGCS’s regulated environment required before deploying to production.

The Results

The modernized BIRT is now a browser-based Pega application, and the review process it supports finally matches how AGCS teams work. Sub-cases let multiple reviewers work the same business review in parallel instead of waiting their turn, and out-of-the-box process and business reporting replaced what used to be a complex, custom build.

For reviewers, the new BIRT saves an estimated 5–15 minutes on every case – a modest number on its own, multiplied across AGCS’s full review caseload into meaningful time back for underwriting and risk consulting work. Because the new workflow is intuitive rather than expert-dependent, teams also rely far less on the specialized institutional knowledge BIRT’s legacy version demanded.

AGCS met its cost-reduction and security-and-compliance goals for the initiative, and because the resulting platform is built on Pega, it’s a foundation the team can keep building on rather than a one-time fix. AGCS is already applying what it learned from BIRT to evaluate other legacy candidates for modernization, including a Lotus Notes application currently under review.

Want to dive deeper into Allianz’s journey? Watch their PegaWorld session here.