Financial Services
Our teams of experts combine deep knowledge of banking, insurance, pensions, private equity and asset management
CLIENT STORY
Delivering a data-driven transformation
The insurance industry is transforming. Ageas, a leading insurance company in Europe and Asia, saw an opportunity to enhance its commercial and customer objectives. To do this, Ageas needed to shape a compelling, state of the art vision on data management and cloud-enabled analytics. Working in close collaboration with Ageas, our team applied agile product management and design thinking, to enable them to achieve their ambition to build a shared understanding of scaling local analytics initiatives using cloud technology.
Today, the strategic importance and potential of data at Ageas is clear. With our support, Ageas are taking critical steps on their data-driven transformation journey, which will help grow inflow, reduce operating costs and build new analytics capabilities.
Key successes
Built a shared understanding of how to scale local analytics initiatives using cloud technology
Co-created a compelling Data Management vision
Leading solution implementation accelerated OpCop analytics projects across five key markets using an agile approach
Insurance company Ageas saw the potential for data and analytics to enhance its customer offering and market position in the markets it operates in. Given the nature of its federated businesses, most of its operating companies (OpCos) have the autonomy to create their own local solutions. However, this also means that ways of managing data are fragmented. It also constrains the ability to build analytics solutions at scale to offer personalised customer services, automate processes and utilise technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Georges Theys, Group Director of Analytics, was given the mandate to help Ageas release strategic value across OpCos initiatives by creating synergies on capabilities, approaches, and technologies at scale.
“There is a significant untapped potential for data and analytics solutions in the insurance sector,” says Georges Theys. “The key challenge for most analytics leaders is to decipher the code to unlock value from data at scale for a global, federated organisation. At Ageas, this is one of the biggest changes to our business to drive forward collaboration and next-gen thinking across our operating companies and PA has been a key partner for us in our journey.”
We worked together as a blended team of PA and Ageas colleagues, engaging its data leaders across Europe and Asia, to draft a compelling vision, understand user needs and define requirements. Our team combined data analytics and insurance experts, designers and developers and Microsoft Azure experts.
We created a framework comprising reusable building blocks, data user journeys, and piloted best of breed technologies able to operationalise the company’s next-gen vision. We facilitated two seminars in Europe and Asia, engaging 50+ global data leaders to uncover data solutions, form an enterprise data strategy, and share reusable analytics use cases.
Next, we made concepts real through practical applications of OpCo analytics initiatives in the cloud. For example, for Ageas’ car repair business, we leveraged Azure as a platform to configure an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) pipeline using Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse Analytics and PowerBI. Testing data and analytics in a pilot environment enabled Ageas to demonstrate business value in the context of the insurance market.
“We applied a pragmatic agile product development and design thinking methodology to translate concepts into working MVP prototypes rapidly using the sandbox-as-a-service concept,” says Chike Eduputa, PA’s data analytics and digital expert. “This presented a step-change in ways of working for OpCos analytics teams.”
Using our proven data and analytics methodology, we partnered with local OpCos to accelerate target projects to drive business value. We coached teams in analytics practices, meaning projects that took months previously to implement now take a matter of weeks to roll out. And by partnering analytics technology in data science and analytical capabilities including artificial intelligence and natural language processing, we’ve anabled Ageas to enhance the business value attributed to their projects.
