Jackson scales its partner ecosystem with Apigee
About Jackson National Life Insurance Company
Jackson (NYSE: JXN) is committed to helping clarify the complexity of retirement planning—for financial professionals and their clients. The company’s range of annuity products, financial know-how, history of award-winning service* and streamlined experiences strive to reduce the confusion that complicates retirement planning. Jackson takes a balanced, long-term approach to responsibly serving all of its stakeholders, including customers, shareholders, distribution partners, employees, regulators and community partners. By providing clarity for all today, Jackson helps drive better outcomes for tomorrow. For more information, visit www.jackson.com.
*SQM (Service Quality Measurement Group) Contact Center Awards Program for 2004 and 2006–2020. (To achieve world-class certification, 80% or more of call-center customers surveyed must have rated their experience as very satisfied, the highest rating possible).
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Contact usJackson hastens its digital transformation by replacing paper-based processes with APIs that securely connect it with partners, streamlining workflows.
Results
- 130 published APIs—May, 2020 to May, 2021
- 40 million to 72 million API calls - May, 2020 to May, 2021
- API calls by external partners—308K to 7 million
Digitizing business operations with APIs
As a top U.S. provider of annuities, Jackson National Life Insurance Company® leads the charge to educate Americans about the importance of retirement planning. That means staying at the forefront of an increasingly digital and interconnected landscape where customers expect services to be available not only in brick-and-mortar locations but online as well—and where business partners are increasingly going digital.
Jackson knew this digital transformation needed to start with the partners in its ecosystem and how the company conducted business. Like many established financial services firms, Jackson engaged with partners using paper-based workflows, such as mailing or faxing documents for reviews and signatures.
“As we looked to expand, we asked ourselves how we could speed up processes to create more business value for our end clients,” says Jeff Borton, assistant vice president (AVP) of Enterprise Architecture. “One idea was to give our ecosystem partners more ways to connect to us electronically rather than through manual processes.”
Jackson already connected directly with various ecosystem partners through different interfaces but wanted to move to an API-based approach that would give them repeatability, consistency, and efficiency.
“Instead of writing our own custom interfaces, we decided to go with APIs and microservices, and we started looking for a platform to manage those APIs,” Borton says.
Taking this approach has resulted in considerable success for the company’s API program—just between the dates of May 2020 and May 2021, the company’s total API call volume has increased by 80 percent.
Security is top of mind
After evaluating many alternatives, Jackson chose the Apigee API Management Platform from Google Cloud because it met all of the company’s requirements, including, most importantly, best-in-class security. Apigee also offered a supportive partnership both during implementation and into the future.
“One of the advantages of working with Apigee was having a partner who could give us best practices and training to smooth the road and help us ramp up quickly,” Borton notes.
After selecting Apigee’s API management platform, Jackson implemented secure APIs to execute digital connectors with ecosystem partners as well as for internal development efforts. As part of this initiative, the company has deployed over 130 APIs to expand its portfolio of API products.
“We told our partners that if we connect digitally with APIs, we can eliminate all the old, paper-based processes and complete transactions much faster,” Borton says.
Borton shares that Apigee provides “a very secure digital handshake with our partners when exchanging information, which is critical for a financial services business. Security is rooted in everything we do.”
To that end, Apigee allows Jackson to enforce consistent security best practices and governance policies across all APIs and protect data at rest and in transit against incursions and other threats. Apigee provides multiple layers of best-in-class security, including secure deployment of services, secure data storage, and secure communication between services.
Building a better partner experience
Moving to an API management platform has allowed Jackson to work much more effectively and efficiently with partners by allowing them to exchange documents via APIs instead of through email, faxes, or postal mail. The company has been able to onboard new partners more rapidly without burdening them with manual processes.
“We were able to leverage APIs to add new partners and show them how quickly we could manage transactions,” Borton adds. “The reception from our partners has been tremendous, leading to a 22x increase in partner API call volume from May 2020 to May 2021.”
The future is digital
Digital transformation is a crucial goal for Jackson, and Apigee has been a part of that process. According to Borton, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this evolution, as Jackson employees and partners alike had to adapt immediately to online tools and move away from in-person and office-centered, paper-based processes.
“Our digital transformation,” he says, “involves moving to a platform world, leveraging more modern development technologies, principles, and integrations, and making and using smaller components and microservices.”
The goal, he shares, is to “eliminate monolithic systems by moving away from the mainframe and into cloud-based computing. It's all done with APIs—and Apigee is in the middle of it all.”
For those considering digital transformation through APIs, Borton notes he is very happy with the services from Apigee, and that they are consistently meeting Jackson’s needs. When selecting an API management platform, he notes, “You need to make sure it has the right security, right monitoring, and right fault tolerance—and the transparency to show you what’s going on with your APIs.”
Apigee, he says, currently checks all of the boxes for Jackson. “We currently use Apigee so we can stay ahead of where the business is going and scale both horizontally and vertically.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Jackson National Life Insurance Company
Jackson (NYSE: JXN) is committed to helping clarify the complexity of retirement planning—for financial professionals and their clients. The company’s range of annuity products, financial know-how, history of award-winning service* and streamlined experiences strive to reduce the confusion that complicates retirement planning. Jackson takes a balanced, long-term approach to responsibly serving all of its stakeholders, including customers, shareholders, distribution partners, employees, regulators and community partners. By providing clarity for all today, Jackson helps drive better outcomes for tomorrow. For more information, visit www.jackson.com.
*SQM (Service Quality Measurement Group) Contact Center Awards Program for 2004 and 2006–2020. (To achieve world-class certification, 80% or more of call-center customers surveyed must have rated their experience as very satisfied, the highest rating possible).