What do you do when your biggest sales season is around the corner and your core sales platform crashes for four hours every day?
You take a risk and place a bet on a new product engineering partner.
It’s a brave move. But deep down, you know that you need a specialist team.
A team of product engineers who can frame the problem to solve, get everyone on the same page, move fast, solve complex problems, and rebuild for modularity and AI.
That bet pays off, and fast.
Within just three weeks, they’ve eliminated the downtime so you can avoid that eye-watering revenue loss.
Within one year, they’ve built a future-proof platform with AI-powered workflows that guarantee faster launches and easy partner integrations.
Who’s the team that accomplished all that?
Well, that’s us!
Read on to find out how we did it.
Who is ABSLI?
Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance (ABSLI) is one of India’s largest life insurers. Their vision is to be a leader and role model in integrated financial services, offering trusted, best-in-class solutions across every stage of a customer’s life: from children's future planning and health coverage to wealth protection, retirement, and investment-linked products.
With a footprint across India, ABSLI operates through an extensive network of banks and financial institutions like the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) and the Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC), relying heavily on partner-led distribution channels to drive insurance sales.
The Challenge
ABSLI’s internal sales platform, called Leap, was mission-critical. It powers their entire insurance sales process and is used daily by their distribution partners.
But under the hood, Leap wasn’t doing so well. The symptoms were clear: ~4 hours of daily downtime, recurring bugs, sluggish release cycles, and weeks to add even one new feature.
The business impact was pretty severe: partner onboarding took months instead of weeks, no clear path to scale or modernize the platform, and most importantly, missed revenue targets, especially during the critical JFM (January, February, March) season, India’s peak insurance sales season.
With the next JFM fast approaching, ABSLI needed a Leap fix, and fast.
The Solution
They made a bold move. Instead of bringing in the usual large verified vendor, ABSLI decided to partner with a specialized engineering team that could move with the urgency and precision of a startup. That’s us!
Mission 1: Stabilize Leap
We kicked off with a 3-week sprint, during which we focused on ABSLI’s critical failure points, diagnosed the core issues, and made the necessary decisions to stop the bleeding.
This is an example of our Control Service, designed specifically for enterprises facing complex and urgent engineering challenges. Our guarantee is that for a fixed fee, the problem gets solved, and fast.
Mission 1 accomplished! Within just three weeks, we fixed the critical errors and ensured that their platform, Leap, was free from the crippling 4 hours of daily downtime. ABSLI could count on a stable and reliable platform to avoid significant revenue loss during its most important sales window of the year.
Mission 2: Build Spectre
Once we fixed the critical issues, we saw an opportunity to reimagine/replace Leap, beyond just patching it up.
We built Spectre within just one year. [a modern, modular version of Leap designed for long-term scalability.] We developed a modular architecture, so new bank partners could be onboarded in days, not months, and reduced costs significantly through replacing expensive cloud dependencies (a $500K/year PDF setup) with lean, open-source solutions.
We worked with an eye on legacy compatibility, making sure we engineered Spectre to operate easily within ABSLI’s 40-year-old tech ecosystem. We also implemented agile development, working with the ABSLI team in product sprints, Scrum ceremonies, and tight governance loops.
The Result
A future-ready platform with startup-level agility, within one of India’s biggest insurers.
What started out as a digital liability turned into a launchpad for AI-powered workstreams. We worked with ABSLI on a full digital transformation, refocusing the work from stabilization to rebuilding, helping them modernize at their core, not just patch things up.
Thanks to our modular architecture and agile methods, ABSLI can count on accelerated product launches, reduced partner onboarding time, and a strong and agile foundation that is strong enough to compete with India’s top insurers.
What ABSLI Says About Working With Us
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"Impressed with the depth of knowledge that the Wednesday Solutions developers bring."
Alok Shenoy, Head of Digital Technology
