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Following the 2021 acquisition of Equidad in Aruba, insurer ENNIA set out to establish a fully digital insurance brokerage. The company is bringing this broker to market under the name Sigi: a Caribbean pioneer where the entire insurance process is handled via straight-through processing (STP) and is completely digital, including online payments—all on a single platform.
Following its acquisition of Equidad in 2021, insurer ENNIA Aruba wanted to establish a fully digital insurance broker on the island. ENNIA is bringing this broker to market under the name Sigi : a pioneer in the Caribbean where the entire insurance process is handled straight-through (STP) and completely digitally, including online payments, all on a single platform.
Managing director Henry van den Berg explained during the Composable Futures 2026 event why ENNIA Aruba chose Novulo as the foundation for these services.
The Caribbean insurance market is historically and legally closely aligned with the situation in the Netherlands. Although American insurance software providers were much closer geographically, managing director Henry van den Berg and his team specifically sought a solution in the Netherlands.
The team initially considered building a Caribbean version of Independer, a true insurance comparison site. They quickly moved away from that idea. "Insurance products in the Caribbean don't differ significantly, and customers are primarily interested in getting insured quickly," Van den Berg notes. Building a full-fledged comparison site adds significant system complexity without providing any real benefit to the customers.
Once the strategy was crystallized, Van den Berg and a small team flew to the Netherlands, where they spent a week visiting various providers. He explains that he was looking for insurance software that would serve ENNIA Aruba well for the foreseeable future. If Sigi’s market adoption in Aruba goes well, expanding to other Caribbean islands is also an option.
Van den Berg also sees opportunities to further expand the range of insurance products. The company initially focused on all mortgage-related products, but in time, all retail products, such as car insurance, will be added.
"It had to be an agile program," Van den Berg observed. The final appointment on Friday afternoon was with Novulo in Enschede. "Yes, that’s really where the story began. We wanted to be true leaders with our strategy. Everything else available on the market at that time didn't give us the feeling that it would help us take that next step."
He explains that ENNIA Aruba wanted to keep the front end of the system 'a bit dumb' and house all the technology and complexity within the insurance system itself. "That really suits Novulo because it gives you the freedom to configure the system according to your own ideas. That was essentially the main reason we ended up choosing Novulo."
Subsequently, Sigi's system was set up by a small project team consisting of local employees and Dutch partners. This way of working allowed the team to make many decisions independently. Weekly consultations were held to align the plans. The platform is now technically live. The official market launch is awaiting a final permit, after which the fire insurance product will be the first to go online.
Throughout the process, Van den Berg learned the importance of being willing to change strategic choices as a project progresses. "You shouldn't be blind to change, and therefore not to changes in the process either. Continuing with the argument that it was once planned that way is very harmful, I think."
For him, the customer experience must come first, not the choice of technology. For example, the team concluded that an application process could be radically simplified. "If you want to sell insurance online, you shouldn't come up with the thirty questions that are on our old-fashioned forms. I've learned that if you put people together with the task of reducing the number of questions, maybe three questions will be gone in two hours. If you turn it around and give the team the task of coming up with a maximum of five questions, then after two hours you only have three. And those work just as well."
With that pragmatic view on customer experience and complexity, Sigi is now ready for the market. As soon as the permit is finalized, the first fire insurance policy will go live, followed by life and home insurance. And if market adoption takes off, Van den Berg is looking beyond Aruba. "You have to stay ahead of the curve," as he summarizes it himself.
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Novulo has been named InsurTech of the Year and Disruptor of the Year at the Europe FinTech Awards 2026, recognizing its impact on the insurance industry and the shift from legacy systems to composable software platforms.
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