Modernizing an Insurance Core in the CIS: A Practical Path
The Legacy Trap: Breaking Free from 1C and Excel
Most insurance companies in the CIS region operate on a fragile foundation: 1C Enterprise serving as a de-facto core system, supplemented by endless Excel spreadsheets tracking everything from policy renewals to claims reserves. This approach worked when policy volumes were manageable and regulators were less demanding. Today, it creates catastrophic technical debt that compounds with every new product launch or regulatory requirement.
The fundamental problem is that 1C was designed for accounting—not insurance operations. It lacks native support for policy lifecycle management, automated underwriting rules, or real-time integration with external systems. Every workaround becomes permanent, every manual process becomes a compliance risk, and every Excel spreadsheet becomes a single point of failure. When your underwriters spend more time copying data between systems than evaluating risks, you've lost the operational efficiency battle.
The Integration Imperative: Registries, Payments, and Identity
Modern insurance operations in Central Asia and the CIS demand real-time connectivity with national infrastructure. UAIS in Uzbekistan requires instant policy registration. OneID and E-IMZO mandate digital identity verification and qualified electronic signatures for policy issuance. SBP in Russia and Payme/Click in Uzbekistan have conditioned customers to expect instant premium payments and claims settlements.
Legacy systems fail spectacularly at this integration challenge because they were never designed with an API-first architecture. Bolting on integrations creates brittle, point-to-point connections that break with every registry update. A modern insurance core must treat national registries, payment rails, and identity providers as first-class integration targets—not afterthoughts requiring custom middleware and constant maintenance.
The 'Wrap and Modernize' Strategy
Complete core replacement is not always the right answer—especially when you have years of historical data in 1C and a finance team trained on its workflows. Beakwise offers a pragmatic 'Digital Twin' approach: keep your accounting ledger in 1C where it belongs, but move policy administration, claims handling, and customer interactions to a modern platform designed for insurance.
This strategy delivers immediate benefits—digital sales channels, automated claims workflows, real-time registry compliance—without the risk and disruption of a full rip-and-replace project. Your finance team continues using familiar tools while your operations team gains modern capabilities. As confidence grows, you can progressively migrate more functionality to the new platform, eventually retiring 1C for insurance operations entirely while maintaining it purely for general ledger functions.
