How ICW Group is building engineering excellence in insurance with Postman

ICW Group's product engineering team supports over 50 APIs across a tightly interconnected technology landscape — policy management, claims, underwriting, billing, and beyond. For years, the roughly 80 developers and quality engineers responsible for those APIs operated in relative isolation. Teams were organized by program, each managing its own collections, documentation, and tooling. There was no shared governance, no engineering-wide visibility, and no centralized catalog of what APIs existed or who owned them.

The cost accumulated quietly. When a new project required integration with an API owned by another team, an engineer first had to identify the right owner — a process that could take days. Once found, the Postman collection they shared was often outdated, maintained by someone who had since moved to another project. Authentication setup consumed additional time. Getting a single test response from an unfamiliar API could take the better part of a week before any meaningful development had begun.

Partner integrations compounded the problem. Coordination with external vendors moved through email chains and intermediary teams, consuming weeks of meetings and calendar-chasing to surface information that should have been immediately accessible. Non-technical stakeholders — business analysts and program managers — had no self-serve path to understand what the API layer could offer them. And underneath it all was a persistent security and governance risk: teams routinely shared API collections, documentation, credentials, and secrets through email and chat, creating uncontrolled copies and making access and version management difficult.

The free edition of Postman was already in use across the organization, but it had sprawled organically with no strategy behind it. Individual teams used it as a testing utility, not as a platform. Collections drifted out of date. Knowledge stayed siloed. There was no engine to drive engineering excellence at scale.

In early 2024, ICW Group restructured its technology organization into a dedicated product engineering group, with an explicit mandate to establish standards, governance, and consistent practices across every delivery team. The decision to move from Postman Free to Postman Enterprise was not an incremental upgrade. It was a platform decision — part of a broader strategy to build the engineering infrastructure of a modern technology company.

“If you're just going to go out and buy the tool, that's all you're going to get. You need to start with your strategy first — understand your pain points, define your engineering practice, your governance, your standards. Then you bring in the tool.”

Gustavo Pena Verplancken, Director of Information Technology, Core Insurance Solutions, ICW Group

Working with Postman's professional services team, ICW Group defined a phased rollout built around three priorities: collaboration, discoverability, and AI readiness.

“Postman stopped being just a tool. It became a platform — one of our backbones that we could build our engineering capabilities on top of.”

Gustavo Pena Verplancken, Director of Information Technology, Core Insurance Solutions, ICW Group

Shared workspaces and partner workspaces replaced email chains and tribal knowledge as the default mode of collaboration. When a new project kicks off — whether internally across pods or with an external vendor — every team member now has access to accurate, current API collections from day one. What previously took a week of meetings and calendar coordination is now instantaneous. Quality engineers can build their automation frameworks in parallel with development, observing request and response shapes in real time before anything is deployed. In-sprint automation, once aspirational, is now the standard.

“Once you see the best way of working, it's hard to go back to working in a less optimized way.”

Sajid Siddiqui, Manager of Software Development, ICW Group

ICW Group's internal API network has given the organization its first consolidated view of its full API estate. Fifty-plus APIs, previously scattered across teams and only partially documented, now have a defined presence that the entire organization can see and act on. For an engineering group that has long operated behind the scenes, the catalog made their work tangible in a new way — a visible inventory of assets, not an abstraction known only to the developers who built them.

That catalog also became the foundation for an AI-powered self-serve layer. ICW Group connected its internal MCP tools to the Postman API network, enabling non-technical stakeholders to query API documentation in natural language through an internal chat interface. Questions that once required tracking down a developer and scheduling a meeting are now answered in real time.

The team has also piloted AI-assisted test case generation, combining Postman, Amazon Q, and their internal MCP framework. The output: automated test cases written to 100% compliance with ICW Group's engineering standards — quality gates that keep pace with the speed of AI-assisted development. Governance modules are now rolling out across every pod, with spec-driven development and contract-driven design on the near-term roadmap.

“With AI, you can generate a lot of code instantly. We need to be able to govern all of that. Postman allows us to go to market faster — but with quality in mind, making sure we're not just shipping code into production.”

Sajid Siddiqui, Manager of Software Development, ICW Group

ICW Group began its Postman Enterprise journey with a pilot of 20 engineers. The team has since grown to over 80 — and groups outside product engineering are now requesting access, drawn by the results they have observed firsthand. Velocity trends across all delivery pods are positive. Sprint commitments are being met. Time to market is compressing.

The gains are structural. New engineers onboard faster because the API catalog is there when they arrive. Partner integrations that once consumed weeks of coordination are operational within days. Quality automation is no longer sequential — it runs in parallel with development, in-sprint, to engineering standards. And non-technical teams can access API documentation without filing a request or attending a meeting.

For ICW Group, Postman has done something more significant than accelerate delivery. It has made the engineering organization's work visible and tangible to the entire business — transforming a set of capabilities that once lived in the heads of individual developers into a managed, discoverable, AI-ready platform. In an industry not traditionally associated with technology leadership, ICW Group is building at the pace and standard of a modern technology company.

“Postman is our water bottle. Seventy-five percent of our body is water — we need it for our sustenance. APIs are the lifeline for our engineering team, and Postman enables us to deliver that lifeline to every part of the organization.”

Sajid Siddiqui, Manager of Software Development, ICW Group