Key Insight
Client
IAG Globus
Website
When a traveller is hospitalised in a foreign country, when an air ambulance needs to be coordinated across borders, when a roadside breakdown happens 8,000 kilometres from home, the response that follows depends on a network. International Assistance Group is one of the largest of those networks, with member companies operating across more than 90 countries and collectively covering more than 118 million end users worldwide.
Behind that network is Globus. The operational platform IONYX built for IAG that turns a global alliance of independent companies into a connected, searchable, collaboratively-operated case management environment.
The Challenge
The travel assistance industry runs on networks of relationships. IAG’s value to its partners comes from the depth and breadth of the network: the doctors, hospitals, air ambulance operators, ground ambulance services, translators, cost containment providers, and telemedicine services that any partner anywhere in the world might suddenly need to engage on behalf of a policyholder.
For years, that network knowledge had been distributed across the partners themselves. Each company knew the providers in its own region and held its own institutional memory of who was reliable, who offered cashless service, who could be relied on for quick medical reports. There was no central system to pull all of that together, no shared place for partners to collaborate on cases that crossed borders, and limited visibility into how the broader network was actually performing.
The pain points were operational and accumulating. No central system to manage the interactions involved in cross-border case management. Friction in internal and partner communication. Limited insight into how partners and providers were performing across the network. And inadequate data analysis and reporting to support strategic decisions about where the network should grow, consolidate, or invest.
The platform IAG needed had to do something genuinely difficult: consolidate the network’s collective knowledge into a single operational system, without taking control away from the independent companies whose autonomy is the network’s foundation.
The Solution
IONYX began with contextual inquiry research grounded in the people actually using the system every day.
- 3 personas identified through contextual inquiry research with active platform users
- 470K+ travel cases managed through Globus
- 118 million end users covered across IAG’s global network
- 135% increase in user-reported efficiency with the new design
Contextual inquiries were conducted with three identified personas representing the distinct ways partners interact with the platform. The interactive prototype that followed was designed against the insights uncovered, then iterated through usability testing with a similar user population. The testing data was benchmarked directly against the original research insights, so every claim of improvement could be measured against a real baseline rather than an aesthetic preference. The 135% efficiency increase reported in user testing reflects that benchmarked comparison.
The handover to development was structured rather than thrown over a wall, with quality assurance running in lockstep with the engineering team to maintain design integrity through the build phase.
Globus is the central digital hub for IAG’s international network. A single platform where IAG’s Core Partners, Assistance Partners, and Correspondent Partners can discover, evaluate, and collaborate with service providers across medical and roadside assistance domains.
The platform brings together what had previously been fragmented across the network.
A global provider database holds public and private hospitals, air ambulance operators, medical escorts, ground ambulance services, doctors and GPs, outpatient centres, translators and interpreters, cost containment providers, and telemedicine services across Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. The data is continuously enriched through automated web crawling, so the network’s knowledge of who’s operating where stays current rather than ageing in static records.
A case collaboration module lets partners create and collaborate on both roadside and medical cases in real time, with API integration capabilities so partner systems can connect into Globus rather than requiring users to switch contexts to engage. Quote to Fly runs the air ambulance quotation and case management workflow end-to-end, allowing partners to request, compare, and manage flight quotations within the same platform that holds the rest of the case data.
Partner network intelligence layers partner-sourced quality data on top of provider profiles. Cashless service capability, discount agreements, ease of obtaining medical reports, patient admission facilitation. The kind of operational knowledge that previously lived in individual partners’ heads now flows back into the network. A separate procurement portal standardises partner questionnaires with automatic scoring across nine assessment categories, giving IAG a structured way to assess the network’s service capability rather than relying on anecdotal sense.
The platform is built to integrate. A REST API allows partners to query the Globus database programmatically, with established integration pathways to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Single sign-on through Microsoft Azure, role-based access control across the user hierarchy, and ongoing integration work with security alert services, accommodation services, and enhanced reporting.
The same Globus platform also powers the public-facing member directory on IAG’s corporate website, with member data flowing live through API rather than being maintained as a separate static directory.
The technical foundation is a Laravel and MySQL stack hosted in the AWS Paris region, with webhook-based continuous deployment from Bitbucket, sized and architected to support the scale of the IAG network and the volume of case activity flowing through it.
The Results
Globus has consolidated what was previously fragmented partner knowledge into a single, continuously updated platform that runs across IAG’s global network.
- 118M end users covered across IAG’s global assistance network
- 470K+ travel cases managed through the Globus platform
- 135% increase in user-reported efficiency from the redesigned system
Partners now identify providers faster, collaborate on cases more effectively across borders, and have meaningfully better visibility of how the broader network is performing. The platform continues to evolve, with active integrations underway for security alerts (Healix), accommodation services (Roomex), and enhanced case statistics and reporting. As the alliance grows, Globus grows with it.
For IONYX, Globus is one of the deepest expressions of the productised platform model that runs through the broader case study portfolio.
