Last year, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Socotra released the industry’s first fully audited PAS performance test. The results showed Socotra could handle 11,500 quote-to-issue transactions per minute with 5,000 concurrent users. Notably, Socotra achieved an average response time of 89.5 milliseconds and completed 95% of API requests in less than 300 ms—all audited and co-published by AWS engineers.
This year, Socotra tackled one of the hardest problems in insurance technology: quoting and binding commercial policies with massive schedules. The findings once again confirm that Socotra delivers unmatched speed at scale, and does so on low-cost servers.
Performance Matters in Commercial Insurance
Every commercial insurer knows the pain of schedules. Fleet policies may cover thousands of vehicles; property policies may include hundreds of locations. Furthermore, each scheduled item may contain hundreds of data fields.
Traditional core systems were never built for this volume, leaving insurers with sluggish performance, lengthy recalculations, and underwriters left waiting to make even simple adjustments.
Performance is more than quoting speed; it reflects how well a system is engineered. Socotra’s culture of rigorous engineering consistently delivers consumer-grade quality, leading to industry-leading performance, reliability, transparency, and connectivity.
Test Setup
For this performance test, we selected a realistic commercial auto insurance product. This is a common product throughout the world, and one that routinely has many exposures, each with a large number of fields.
We simulated real-world, large-scale conditions:
- 50,000 existing policies in the system
- 27 fields per scheduled item
- 200 concurrent operations
Next, we tested different numbers of scheduled items per policy:
- Scenario 1 – Policies with 35 vehicles each
- Scenario 2 – Policies with 2,750 vehicles each
For additional realism, actual policies were randomly generated with 20 – 50 vehicles and 500 – 5,000 vehicles, respectively. Vehicle count represents an average.
Hardware was provisioned to match the load. Scenario 1 used Socotra “medium” provisioning, with AWS hosting cost of $400 per day. Scenario 2 used Socotra “large” provisioning, with AWS hosting cost of $600 per day.
Lastly, we broke the underwriting workflow into three parts, which we individually tested:
- Submission creation – Account creation, schedule upload, and validation
- Pricing and rating – Applying rating logic across thousands of items
- Quote issuance – Underwriting, acceptance, and issuance to bind coverage
The white paper breaks down the underwriting process further, into nine stages with individual test results. It also includes P95 operation times, in addition to the average operation times in the results below.
Test Results
The benchmarks tell a clear story: Socotra handles even the most complex commercial workloads with speed, consistency, and cost-efficiency.
These are the average workflow execution times observed:
Extreme Stress Test
After completing realistic scale tests, Socotra engineering decided to go further. Much further.
Socotra tested a policy with 500,000 scheduled vehicles and 254 fields per vehicle. The platform uploaded the schedule in under 2 minutes, and successfully quoted and issued the policy. While no insurer would actually quote at this scale, the test proves Socotra’s architecture can handle unprecedented complexity without performance issues.
Socotra estimates the platform could support tens of millions of scheduled items before approaching performance boundaries—future-proofing carriers for decades of growth.
The Technology Behind the Performance
Many PAS vendors claim to be “cloud-ready.” Socotra proves it, with published benchmarks and transparent results. Our architecture was built for modern scale:
Elastic autoscaling accelerates performance as workloads increase.
Microservices and redundancy maintains speed and uptime under stress.
Open APIs enable integrations without introducing bottlenecks.
Cost-aware scaling delivers performance without waste.
A Note On Reliability
Performance is only valuable if the system is also reliable. Socotra is the only insurance technology provider to proudly publish reliability metrics, which lead the industry.
In 2023 and 2024, Socotra customers upgraded 100 times while experiencing less than 60 minutes of total downtime. This industry-leading reliability is made possible by Socotra’s highly resilient cloud-native design, unique among insurance core system providers.
Looking Ahead
Good
Affordable
Fast
By testing far beyond real-world requirements, Socotra empowers insurers can move forward with confidence, knowing they won’t outgrow the platform. Performance at this scale is proof that Socotra’s engineering quality extends across every dimension of the system.
Socotra is not only built for speed, but also for flexibility. With Socotra, insurers can deploy any insurance product for any geography or distribution channel—all with the same performance and reliability at scale.
Looking Ahead
By testing far beyond real-world requirements, Socotra empowers insurers can move forward with confidence, knowing they won’t outgrow the platform. Performance at this scale is proof that Socotra’s engineering quality extends across every dimension of the system.
Socotra is not only built for speed, but also for flexibility. With Socotra, insurers can deploy any insurance product for any geography or distribution channel—all with the same performance and reliability at scale.
