Startup Qoala Powers Microinsurance Expansion Using AWS Fargate

Qoala

Bringing Microinsurance to Consumers

Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, Qoala is an insurtech startup that partners with retailers and insurance companies to bring innovative microinsurance products to market. Microinsurance, in this case, refers to small-scale insurance policies that pay out just a few hundred dollars and cover incidents such as flight delays or cancellations, or damage to personal items such as smartphones.

Claim Digitization and Automation

Qoala’s technology allows insurance companies to automate decision making during claim processing. It examines uploaded pictures or videos using computer vision technology backed by machine learning (ML) models. For instance, companies can analyze videos to confirm cracks in phone screens or to identify surface scratches, dents, or other damage to cars. “Having such automation greatly reduces the time and need for manual physical reviews and also allows insurance partners to quickly filter and reject invalid claims,” says Martin Hong, CTO at Qoala.

“We saw the number of data transactions increase from 10,000 to 100,000 in a day after a new partner integrated its systems with Qoala. But thanks to the flexibility of the AWS Cloud and AWS Fargate, our applications could handle the increase without any performance issues and with minimal effort.”

– Martin Hong, CTO, Qoala

  • About Qoala

  • Indonesian startup Qoala partners with retailers and insurance companies, helping them provide microinsurance services to customers cost-effectively using Qoala optical character recognition and ML technology.

  • Benefits
    • Saves several hours weekly by automating provisioning
    • Pays only when containerized applications are running
    • Seamlessly scales to support a 10x increase in data transactions
    • Gains fast response when escalating support issues
  • AWS Services Used

Gains Flexibility in the Cloud

The business looked to launch on the cloud right from the start because of its business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model. Hong explains, “The complexity of B2B2C makes it hard for us to predict our computing requirements, and we have to ensure fast customer response times. The flexibility of the cloud was the right choice. We’re also planning to expand regionally, and a cloud infrastructure would make that task easier.” Qoala chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) due to its reliability and its fast and excellent technical support. The team at Qoala also have regular one-on-one sessions with the regional AWS Solutions Architect.

Automated Scaling Saves Hours Each Week

Qoala runs containers using AWS Fargate, a compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). With AWS Fargate, Qoala doesn’t have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. Hong says, “By using AWS Fargate, we are only charged when resources are utilized, which means cost savings for us. We’ve also saved several hours of manual provisioning and scaling per week. Our DevOps team can now devote more time to other automation and monitoring activities.”

Managing Bandwidth and Capacity

The business is also using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), a fully managed message-queuing service, and can now overcome differences in bandwidth and capacity between insurance and retail partners. Hong says, “If an insurance partner’s system is unable to handle the traffic bandwidth from our retail partners, we can easily configure Amazon SQS to throttle the traffic flowing in.”

Supports Tenfold Growth in Data Transactions

With AWS Fargate, Qoala can seamlessly scale applications when data traffic suddenly rises after it signs up a new retail partner. Says Hong, “We saw the number of data transactions increase from 10,000 to 100,000 in a day after a new partner integrated its systems with Qoala. But thanks to the flexibility of the AWS Cloud and AWS Fargate, our applications could handle the increase without any performance issues and with minimal effort.”

The diagram below illustrates the AWS infrastructure at Qoala:

AWS infrastructure at Qoala

Learn More

To learn more, visit https://thinkwithwp.com/containers.