Sitting among uneasy passengers and crying babies aboard a 2014 flight, SURE founder Wayne Slavin had an idea. He wondered whether his seatmates would feel calmer if they’d been able to insure their trip before boarding. After asking around, his fellow passengers confirmed his suspicion: Packing was hard, but protecting their stuff proved even harder.
That same year, he founded Santa Monica-based software insurance company SURE. As it turned out, the demand for such digital policies extended beyond travel. SURE now offers rideshare insurance, fine art insurance, landlord insurance — and the list goes on.
Current CTO Yarden Sachs joined the ranks as a technical lead in 2015. Sachs said his team uses Python to incorporate a rate order calculator (ROC) into the existing SaaS platform. The ROC gives customers quick cost estimates based on set external factors. While the department also works with Ruby, Go and Node, they chose Python for its scalability.
Around six years ago, SURE created a fully digital platform to distinguish itself within the market. Today, Python helps them stay ahead.
Current project being built with Python: Solving and designing a lightning-speed ROC.
Why was Python the best language for the job?
ROCs are like very long math problems. They take variables, like your age and your car model, and end up telling you how much the insurance for your car costs. To get to that final cost, we need to build in a lot of factors and database lookups, and Python is perfect for making elegant and performant code. That’s why our teams love Python. It makes building complex procedures a delight.
Python makes building complex procedures a delight.’’
What impact will this project have on your customers, your company or the industry as a whole?
Our mission is to improve every aspect of insurance, and that includes bringing our customers out of the dark ages. Today, the insurance industry is built on legacy systems that take between five to 30 seconds to calculate a premium. Then those systems ask the customer to call an agent to complete the purchase.
Our SaaS platform and developer tools enable global insurers and consumer brands to distribute and service any insurance policy digitally. Our ROC lab is a devout Python shop. Our customer’s users can get an insurance quote in seconds and coverage in a single click.
