Bridging the Gap: Why Insurance Needs UI Interoperability

For decades, insurance firms have invested heavily in back-end integration, connecting core systems through well-established patterns and technologies. From CORBA and SOAP to RESTful APIs and microservices, the evolution of integration has been continuous, shaping how data moves between applications and services. These architectures have matured in a symbiotic relationship, ensuring seamless connectivity between back-end systems.

Yet, for all this progress, there remains a critical gap: application-to-application integration at the user interface level.

The Missing Piece in Insurance Integration

Restful APIs have become the dominant force in enabling client applications to interact with back-end services. They provide structured access to data and functionality, allowing developers to build efficient, service-oriented architectures. However, these patterns stop short of solving a fundamental problem—how applications interact at the point of consumption, whether on the desktop or within a browser.

Today’s insurance professionals—agents, underwriters, and claims processors—juggle multiple front-end applications daily. Instead of seamless workflows, they are forced to manually bridge the gaps between systems, retyping data, copying and pasting between applications, and relying on swivel-chair integration. The user has become the integration engine. With the right tools, this is a powerful place to sit.

Enter UI Interoperability

This is precisely where UI interoperability (or interop) comes in. Just as message buses and remote method invocation revolutionized back-end integration, interoperability at the front-end enables applications to communicate directly, without requiring back-end modifications.

These principles were first formalized in the Capital Markets sector, where trading applications needed real-time, standardized communication. The FDC3 standard emerged to provide a structured language for cross-application workflows. While originally designed for Capital Markets use cases and workflows, these patterns can be applied to any industry where knowledge workers interact with multiple applications.

The Impact of UI Interoperability on Insurance

Bringing interoperability to the user desktop unlocks a new level of efficiency, allowing insurers to:

• Eliminate swivel-chair workflows – No more manual retyping or copy-pasting between applications.
• Codify best practices – Standardize human-driven processes across teams and departments.
• Reduce process lag time – Minimize the delays caused by manual application switching.
• Enable seamless cross-application workflows – Allow front-end applications to exchange context and data in real time.
• Remove repetitive manual tasks – Free up employees to focus on higher-value work.
• Sync (rather than merge) multiple PAS systems

Where Insurers have started to address the siloed nature of their operations many have taken the approach of consolidating some of their core functions to a small number of monolithic application platforms. This can be a very expensive and long journey, often leaving them with a significantly reduced level of agility.

Using UI Interoperability at the desktop many of the challenges of a complex heterogeneous enterprise architecture can be overcome much faster, at vastly reduced cost and with increased agility. This statergy avoids the need to consolidate core functions such as policy administration into single platforms, allowing the use of best of breed applications and services.

Bridging the Integration Divide

Insurance IT leaders have spent years perfecting back-end connectivity, but it’s time to extend these same principles to the desktop. By applying interoperability at the UI layer, insurance firms can achieve a level of efficiency and agility that back-end integration alone cannot provide.

Your back-end systems are connected—why not your front-end applications? It’s time to bridge the last integration gap.