My RCA (the mandatory car insurance in Romania) expires next month. Yes. I now sell car insurances online for a living, so I bought the new policy from one of my own apps. In production. With my own money.

The wizard worked. The payment worked. The policy got legally issued, but the PDF never came.

The insurer's document API returned a 404. Not the quoting call, not the issuing call, just the endpoint that produces the actual paper. So I was legally insured and could not prove it. The car policy exists, but only inside the broker's internal platform. My customer (also me) had nothing.

I emailed the broker the exact request I made to their service and the response I got back. The kind of bug report I wish my own users sent me. The reply, roughly translated: "What you're saying makes no sense. It works for me. Test again, maybe it was a one-off error."

I replied apologizing. Maybe I didn't explain it well. In addition, I asked if they checked the attachment I sent them to be able to dig deeper.

Next reply: "I tried to help you with some advice. Support is not my job, my colleagues handle that." Same partner who earlier advised me not to build an online home insurance platform and not to sell car insurances to certain company categories. Noted.

Then their IT manager answered. And guess what? Insurers can return errors on any of the three API calls: quoting, issuing, generating the PDF. It's known. It's expected. It even has an official procedure. When the API dies, someone continues the flow by hand in their internal platform. Basically, I have to email a "Doyenne" whose job includes generating the policy PDF manually and emailing it to the customer. Sometimes the insurer debugs the thing and fixes it. Other times "their service recovers on its own". Damn! Miracles happen in IT too.

An entire industry's backup plan is one person generating and emailing PDFs by hand.

I did get my policy in the end. I downloaded it myself from the admin dashboard. Operator and customer, same guy. I also build a workflow to get notified by email when this happens again, so I can go into the broker platform, download the PDF there, upload it in my system and re-trigger the confirmation email delivery. Which, even this, I think I can automate even further, but it's a quick win for now.

And people thought there's no more room in the insurance market. There's plenty of room. And considering these are the workflows now, I think I'm even early.

So here's to boring, automated and better insurance apps! 🥂