A modern data platform will enable the life and pensions company to identify new business opportunities, simplify reporting and compliance, and integrate acquisitions more easily.
Situation.
This international financial organisation provides investment, savings and protection solutions to international investors around the world. With upwards of 80,000 policyholders and over $11.5bn in assets under management, they employ more than 350 staff. Like many insurance companies, this organisation has grown partly through acquisition.
That strategy has left it with several legacy systems and data silos, making it hard to gain an overall picture of its customer base and its assets under management. The fragmented data landscape means staff have to spend significant manual effort on compiling reports and answers to internal queries.
Statutory and regulatory reporting, customer communications and risk exposure analyses are becoming progressively more challenging to deliver in short timeframes. Meanwhile, the organisation is unable to get valuable insight into its business to understand where to focus its efforts for maximum returns and profitability.
The proposed acquisition of another organisation has proved a tipping point and instead of adding another set of legacy systems and databases to its environment, they started to look for a solution that would allow them to centralise all its data on a single platform.
Having evaluated several off-the-shelf data integration solutions, the organisation realised it needed more than just a technology solution. It needed a strategy that would enable it to maximise the business value of its data – now and into the future. It looked for an external partner to help it formulate that strategy and chose to work with Adatis.
Approach.
Adatis worked alongside the organisation’s team on-site, to draw up a data strategy roadmap for the months and years ahead. This involved workshops with representatives from the organisation’s lines of business to understand what they would like to achieve with the data and assessing the cost-to-benefit ratio of each requirement. The team then tiered the requirements into four priority levels, based on how closely they mapped to the organisation’s overall business objectives.
The result was a roadmap that implements the high-priority, high-return initiatives first, so the organisation could start to see business value fast from its expanding data estate. For example, one initiative will create a central team of Business Intelligence specialists, drawn from across different lines of business, to provide insight, reports and analysis to the business.
At the heart of the new data strategy will be a central data platform using Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse running on IFGL’s on-premises infrastructure. The platform will ingest data from multiple sources – including FPIL systems once the acquisition gains regulatory approval – and will cleanse and consolidate it into a single version of the truth.
With the ability to scale further to accommodate future acquisitions, the platform will be a highly valuable asset that will gain even more value as data is added to it.
Solution.
The Organisation now has a clear roadmap in place to enable the company to become a data-driven insurer. A modern, scalable data warehouse will provide a single source of truth about their products, customers, IFA network, and assets under management.
That means the company will be able to gain timely insights into areas like:
- Cross-sell and upsell opportunities with existing customers
- Which products, customers and IFAs are the most profitable
- Which marketing campaigns and channels deliver the best results
- Where the greatest areas of risk exposure are across the business
In addition, with all data standardised and centralised, the organisation will spend much less time gathering data for statutory, regulatory and management reporting, freeing up a lot more time to analyse the data and extract insight from it. They will also gain a modern data warehouse architecture that’s ready to be used with new tools for data visualisation and AI-powered analytics. As they continue their journey to becoming a truly data-driven insurer, they will be able to apply progressively more sophisticated analytics to its data to automate manual processes and uncover new business opportunities.
Download the Case Study here.