Overview
Solartis was founded in 2004 in California by Siby Nidhiry and Nick Richardson. The founders had been working at ePolicy, a venture backed startup that started as an online MGA and then pivoted to a software product company that licensed to insurance companies the underlying online MGA technology they had built. Nidhiry and Richardson saw an opportunity to create a better automated quote and policy administration platform from scratch using the latest technology and a SaaS multi-tenant architecture.
The early years were hard going as insurance companies were risk adverse on the concept of moving from an on premises to a cloud environment. But slowly the tide turned, and insurance companies began to experiment with SaaS and license the Solartis product for their specialty and non-admitted products. The focus was primarily on distribution where the carrier wanted either the MGA, the retail agent, or the customer to perform many of the processing activities. In these cases, it made sense to use a SaaS delivery method. Solartis had the functionality and the capability to implement distribution far quicker and less expensively than their internal IT or the other vendors in the market at the time.
Fast forward to 2021, Solartis provides technology and services to P&C insurance companies, MGAs, and risk retention/captives in North America with expansion in the works to serve similar customers in Asia. Solartis employs 850 people in two divisions; Solartis Automation which offers the Solartis Insure Platform and Solartis Administer which provides outsourced business process support for carriers and MGAs on their legacy systems from our locations in Southern India.
Our philosophy at Solartis is to constantly push forward to solve a “better” set of policy administration problems for our insurance customers. We have re-architected the Solartis Platform from scratch 3 times in the last 15 years as developments in information technology have enabled us to improve functionality, performance, and cost-effectiveness. The most recent examples have been our evolution to:
- Microservices architecture
- Fully configurable insurance product management for use by business analysts instead of requiring software engineers
- Standardization on BPMN for business rules, rating, and workflow
- Automated Application and Microservice monitoring for alerting and self-healing of failures and performance issues
Solartis added a significant strength in 2019 by “cracking the code” on how to natively consume ISO Electronic Rating Content (ERC) for Commercial Lines into the Solartis Platform. ISO ERC is an immense library of insurance product data tables, rating algorithms and business rules that is being continually updated by ISO as new ISO Circulars and Filings are implemented. Other vendors rely on large internal teams of business analysts, configuration and software engineers and testers to interpret and implement the ISO Commercial Lines Manuals and Filing/Circular updates. By automating the process, we have cut time, cost, and the chance of errors.
A potential perceived weakness of Solartis is that we do not offer a “full suite” solution of policy/billing/claims/financial backend. We are a hard-core policy administration solution that extends into billing and provides FNOL for claims. We have found that in many cases the full suite solutions are not what a customer needs because these platforms are built on a monolithic architecture. If the customer already has a claims solution or outsources to a TPA they do not need the claims functionality but end up paying for it either in the price or in the implementation effort needed to figure out how to integrate with a monolithic platform.
The Solartis Platform is different. Our microservices are fully configurable and can be licensed individually or as an orchestrated set. Our platform is designed for integration and we are currently integrated with multiple payment gateways, claims systems, and third-party data and content providers.