CZ Zorgverzekeringen

Building reliable, secure digital health insurance access with Flutter

Goal

With 3.8 million customers across the Netherlands, CZ’s primary goal is to deliver a great user experience with impeccable data security. For their first app, the team used a low code solution to help them launch quickly. Soon, however, the team wanted to explore more UX possibilities, and it was time to look for another solution. To do so, CZ asked Sopra Steria, digital business partner, to join forces in the selection process and rebuilding of the app for its three labels.

Why Flutter?

The team made a list of their most critical requirements, starting with security. All of CZ’s development teams are DevSecOps teams, which means that security is always an important part of the development lifecycle. Next, they needed a solution that offered a great user experience, an active community, fast development speed and easy to learn.

Based on this list, CZ ranked Flutter and several other popular mobile frameworks and then created some proofs of concept to verify their findings. Flutter emerged the clear winner for its multiplatform support, flexibility, and developer efficiency.

Their solution

The team discovered that Flutter would allow them to provide new functionality faster and keep it maintainable. When reflecting on the developer experience, Remi Appels, software architect, Sopra Steria said, ”Almost half of the development team didn’t have any experience in Dart or Flutter, and they learned fast! Developing in Flutter is fun, and creating smooth & fancy UI components is easy.”

They also found that hot reload helped them to fine-tune UI details quickly, allowing them to deliver more features with less effort.

“With Flutter, we could build anything our designers could think of, with great security and performance, and still access native features of the platforms.”

- Bas de Cort, lead mobile developer CZ

Results

Since relaunching their app with Flutter, CZ’s average Play store rating and Net Promoter Score have both improved. They have also reduced their time to market, allowing them to start releasing big new features every quarter, as well as continuing to improve existing ones.

Based on their success, CZ is currently exploring the possibilities of using Firebase to extend their current toolset, including tools like Firebase Crashlytics, Remote Config, feature flags, remote messaging, AB testing, and push notifications.