MRH Trowe


Case Studies

Flexible and secure growth for MRH Trowe with AWS Cloud

About MRH Trowe

MRH Trowe is one of the ten largest German industrial insurance brokerages. Along with MRH Trowe Insurance Brokers GmbH, the Mesterheide Rockel Hirz Trowe AG Holding umbrella also comprises several specialized providers for different segments. MRH Trowe provides extensive expertise in practically all insurance segments for industrial and commercial customers as well as high net worth individuals. Run by its owners, the company is pursuing a consistent course of expansion, offering comprehensive advice, specialized teams and a high level of digitalization at the interfaces between clients, brokers and insurers. The company employs about 900 staff who manage a premium volume of more than €500 million.

Summary

The insurance industry must keep pace with a multitude of regulatory requirements and the sector is fiercely competitive. Despite this situation, the industrial insurance specialist MRH Trowe is growing – regularly adding new broker partners and integrating them into its IT infrastructure. To overcome the issues associated with this, the company is migrating fully to the cloud. Together with its partner AllCloud and the AWS Migration Acceleration Program, MRH Trowe has managed to reduce its costs by 35 percent compared to the on-premises infrastructure. As a result, the company has resolved its performance issues. It can quickly add new brokers to the platform and these in turn benefit from better security and speed.

The industrial insurance market is currently going through a phase of consolidation and MRH Trowe is one of the players actively involved in it. The firm currently has about 900 staff and had revenues of around 100 million euros in 2022. In the last 1.5 years alone, the industrial insurance broker acquired 15 smaller brokerage firms. As a result, it took nothing less than a feat of strength to integrate all these new partners into the company’s IT infrastructure. It needed to pay particular attention to compliance with regulatory requirements like GDPR, as the insurance sector naturally works with a lot of personal data.

Integration of heterogeneous IT infrastructures

“We frequently come up against antiquated IT infrastructures, including in the companies we’ve acquired,” notes Lars Mesterheide, Managing Partner at MRH Trowe. “We often still receive paper mail from some business partners on the carrier side.” But the wide range of server operating systems wasn’t the only issue during the migration. A sobering aspect was the state of the IT standards being used, especially from the security perspective. Today, whenever an additional company is integrated into the new cloud platform, an AWS standard security setting is applied to it. That automatically replaces the old security measures. Describing the experience, Mesterheide comments: “The typical password is Admin or Test, sometimes with up to ten employees using it. Nothing surprises us anymore – we’ve seen server rooms where highlighter pens are wedged between two machines to keep them apart so that they can just breathe a bit. It’s also not unusual to find the server cabinet next to the coffee machine in the kitchen area.” It quickly became clear that the on-premises security level benefited massively from the migration into the cloud.

 

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