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How SBI General Insurance seized the opportunity as an early adopter of the API ecosystem.
With the insurance landscape evolving at speed, SBI General Insurance Company (SBIGIC) recognized a powerful opportunity to scale and innovate. Customers were beginning to expect more—real-time quotes, tailored products, seamless digital claims, and consistent experiences across channels. Insurance itself was expanding beyond a standalone offering to become part of wider ecosystems in health, mobility, travel, and retail. To thrive in this environment, rapid and secure data exchange through APIs became essential. At the same time, regulatory shifts—similar to Open Banking in financial services—were opening new possibilities for insurers to collaborate with partners, aggregators, and fintechs in a secure and structured way.
Tech used
API Management
Automation
Cloud
Zero Trust
India
Challenge
For SBIGIC, adopting an API-driven model meant navigating several strategic, organizational, technical, and regulatory challenges. As a subsidiary of SBI, expectations were already high, and the company needed to ensure a world-class API ecosystem aligned with the reputation of its parent organization. The customer base also brought complexity: large government and public sector entities like IRCTC came with high digital expectations, while aggregator-driven customers sought highly customized digital experiences. SBIGIC needed to address both ends of the spectrum.
Another challenge lay in defining the right business and technology strategy. SBIGIC had to identify which APIs would generate real business value, such as those related to quotes, claims, underwriting, and data, and which should remain internal. At the same time, the company had to find a balance between offering free APIs to encourage adoption and monetized APIs to create revenue streams. Convincing partners such as brokers, banks, and insurtechs to adopt and integrate with SBIGIC’s APIs required a cultural shift across the ecosystem, moving from a product-centric mindset to one centered on innovation and collaboration.
On the technical side, SBIGIC faced the difficulty of working with legacy systems and siloed operations. Underwriting, claims, actuarial, and policy systems all ran independently, making API standardization a complex task. Many core systems relied on mainframes or monolithic architectures not designed for real-time API integration. Bridging these with modern APIs while ensuring scalability, traffic management, and partner-friendly security was critical. In addition, regulatory requirements around sensitive financial and health data meant that the APIs had to be designed with robust security, consent management, and compliance controls at their core.
Solution
To address these challenges, SBIGIC undertook a careful evaluation of platforms and implementation partners. After running proof of concepts and studying the market, SBIGIC selected IBM API Connect as its API management platform and chose Cateina as the implementation partner. Cateina worked closely with SBIGIC from the initial strategy stage, ensuring that the platform design aligned with the company’s long-term goals of expanding distribution, enabling embedded insurance, and accelerating product innovation.
Together, the teams prioritized high-value use cases that could deliver immediate business impact. These included APIs for quotes, claims, policy issuance, customer onboarding, and risk scoring. The API roadmap was carefully designed to differentiate between internal APIs focused on efficiency, partner APIs designed for collaboration, and public APIs aimed at driving innovation. This clear categorization allowed SBIGIC to align its API initiatives with business outcomes while also meeting regulatory and compliance requirements.
From a technical perspective, Cateina and SBIGIC established a robust foundation for the platform by defining architecture, infrastructure sizing, and governance models. Security frameworks were embedded into the design through OAuth2, JWT, encryption, consent management, and audit logging. Subsystems such as the API Gateway, API Manager, Developer Portal, and Analytics were deployed and configured, creating an ecosystem that could support both current and future demands. Once the infrastructure was in place, SBIGIC moved into building and publishing APIs with best practices such as OpenAPI specifications, sandbox environments for partners, and reusable API designs.
Result
By adopting IBM API Connect and building its API ecosystem with Cateina, SBIGIC achieved a transformation that reshaped its position in the insurance market. Product launches that once took months due to legacy complexities were now completed in weeks. APIs provided standardized, reusable services for policy issuance, claims processing, and risk scoring, enabling SBIGIC to launch innovative offerings such as pay-as-you-drive auto insurance, micro-travel insurance, and health-linked wellness programs in record time. This significantly reduced time-to-market and increased the company’s agility in responding to customer needs.
The new platform also unlocked powerful distribution opportunities by embedding insurance within partner ecosystems. Banks, car dealerships, e-commerce platforms, and healthcare providers could now seamlessly integrate SBIGIC’s offerings into their customer journeys. Insurance products became available at the exact point of need, whether it was during a loan application, a travel booking, or a health service interaction. This not only improved accessibility but also drove higher adoption and cross-selling opportunities.
Equally important, SBIGIC established a strong compliance and security foundation. By embedding consistent authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit logging across its APIs, the company ensured compliance with IRDAI regulations and prepared itself for upcoming Open Insurance initiatives. The ecosystem also created direct revenue streams through monetized APIs and indirect gains from increased embedded distribution. Customers, in turn, experienced faster services, real-time interactions, and smoother journeys across mobile apps, portals, and partner platforms—building trust, loyalty, and long-term value.
