Direct Fleet Insurance is an online trading platform which connects brokers with insurers to transact motor insurance (commercial fleet and private motor). The primary language is PHP, with a MySQL database for storage.
I joined the company as the Technical Manager in March 2009, was promoted to IT Director in October 2010, and left in November 2013 to work at the University of Manchester. I came back as a freelance consultant in July 2015 and mainly work on projects. I also occasionally visit existing and prospective clients on behalf of DFI.
Projects I have worked on include:
- Full cycle accounts system which automatically produces invoices when a transaction is processed on the site, as well as logging all incoming and outgoing premium payments and handling credit control. Includes support for multiple currencies and automatic calculation of month-end creditor and debtor figures for reconciliation with external accounting packages.
- Claims system which imports data from Excel spreadsheets and automatically produces year-end claims experience for policies.
- On-demand PDF versions of a range of documents, re-using the same base HTML templates with different stylesheets.
- Automated generation of reports in a variety of formats, including Excel spreadsheets and CSV files.
- Commercial insurance quotation platform, with a dynamic question set based on level of cover required.
- Full cycle breakdown cover system, from automated quotation to invoicing and handling of mid-term adjustments.
- Commercial motor rating engines which produce automated responses (quote/refer/decline) for a major European insurer and a UK Managing General Agent.
- Private motor rating engine which produces an automated quote.
- Claims management system used by several UK Managing General Agents, including First Notification of Loss, payments authorisation system, claims account management and onward reporting for insurers and re-insurers.
- Designed and developed reporting for analysis of a book of motor fleet business.
- Created reproducible local development environments using Vagrant, Ansible and Docker.
- Regular server migrations to upgrade PHP from 5.3 to 7.4 and increase capacity.
- Hiring an additional developer, including writing the job specification, attending interviews and help with the new starter process (setup of development environment using configuration stored in version control).
I have also taken underwriting criteria from several insurers and turned them into web services which take information about a risk (vehicle type, driver’s licence, No Claims Bonus etc.) and produce an automated quotation. These web services were used for providing the insurance component of a leased private car scheme used by a number of large UK companies, and produced in excess of 100,000 quotation responses each year.
On the business side, I instigated and oversaw the transfer of the site from one hosting provider to another, which resulted in a 25% reduction in monthly hosting costs.