MNRB insurance reduces costs and secures systems with Kong API platform

Driving Strategic Growth Through Digital Transformation

MNRB Holdings Berhad is a prominent Malaysian investment holding company offering management services to its subsidiaries in reinsurance, retakaful, and retail takaful, an Islamic cooperative insurance model. With a strong regional presence spanning Asia and the Middle East, MNRB plays a crucial role in enabling local insurers to compete globally by underwriting and supporting their reinsurance needs.

Driven by a commitment to innovation, MNRB is transforming the way it delivers insurance services through a unified, secure, and API-led infrastructure.

Scaling with Security in a Digital-First World

As MNRB expanded its digital footprint locally and abroad, the Digital Innovation Department identified the need to modernize its technology infrastructure. Their goal: to become an API-first organization capable of delivering faster, more efficient digital services while maintaining the highest levels of security.

To achieve this, the team required a robust API gateway that could streamline API development, ensure secure connections between front-end and back-end services, and support microservices adoption, all while reducing operational overhead.

Selecting Kong to Power a Modern API Ecosystem

Working closely with its technology partner, Crest Infosolutions, MNRB selected Kong Gateway Enterprise to anchor its new digital architecture. Kong’s unified API management platform allowed MNRB to centralize access, routing, and monitoring across its services, a critical capability for delivering real-time insurance verification and seamless customer experiences.

“We needed a platform that could consolidate all our systems and deliver API-led capabilities across our infrastructure,” said Mohd Khairul Hairi B Mazlan, Head of DevOps at MNRB. “With Crest Infosolutions’ guidance, Kong was the clear choice.”

MNRB also implemented Kong’s API catalog to give internal teams the ability to view, test, and consume services more efficiently, streamlining development cycles and accelerating time to market.

From Days to seconds: Instantaneous Customer Verification

Before implementing Kong, verifying customer policies across systems could take several days, often delaying claims processing. Today, with Kong Gateway Enterprise at the core, MNRB delivers real-time insurance verification, enabling immediate service delivery. “This used to take a matter of days. Now, with Kong, it’s instantaneous,” says Mohd Khairul Hairi B Mazlan, Head of DevOps at MNRB. Multiple systems now work in tandem to issue pricing comparisons, confirm customer purchases via email and SMS, and allow digital claim submissions in real time; all secured and orchestrated via Kong.

Embracing Microservices for Flexibility and Cost Efficiency

Kong also empowered MNRB to transition to a microservices-based architecture, which enhances scalability and decouples teams for independent deployment. By offloading traffic management and service discovery to Kong, MNRB reduced its reliance on additional hardware and load balancers, resulting in substantial cost savings. Yet with flexibility comes risk. To ensure secure service exposure, MNRB implemented a layered strategy combining monolithic and containerized services protected by Kong’s enterprise-grade security features. “This was only possible using Kong Enterprise Gateway to manage and secure the connections from front-end to back-end services. This strategy has led to significant cost savings while keeping our services secure and protected,” says Mohd Khairul Hairi B Mazlan.

Ensuring Resilience and Observability

As its service network grew, MNRB needed a resilient architecture that wouldn’t compromise visibility or security. With a three-tier setup secured by a DMZ firewall and enhanced by Kong’s security plugins (OAuth2, OIDC, and more), the team achieved both; protecting APIs while maintaining high system availability.

This approach reduced infrastructure complexity and allowed MNRB to secure its environment without the need for additional virtual machines or excessive spend.

Faster Development, Better Products

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