The vast quantities of data that insurance companies accumulate can become complicated to handle, especially for organisations that have been around for more than 100 years and have made several acquisitions along the way. Zurich Insurance went through a transformation to simplify its data processes, and was recognised with a DataIQ Award, taking home the Transformation with Data prize.
Zurich Insurance Group has immense quantities of data. It has a workforce of 4,500 in the UK, operates in 170 countries, has made several acquisitions and holds transactional data on policies, policy holders, claims and brokers.
It comes as no surprise that the nearly 150-year-old company would have hundreds of legacy applications as well as different systems and different code bases. According to chief data officer, Anita Fernqvist, this meant that management information (MI) solutions were all over the place.
“You get a divergence between what is logged in the financial systems and the management information systems. It may not be an error per se, but not having absolute track of how information is derived, what logic is used and what transformation it goes through means it is very hard to reconcile the numbers between financial systems and the MI solutions,” said Fernqvist.
Essentially, there was not a ‘single version of the truth’. Fernqvist took over the data area in January 2016 after 11 years with the group and found that the MI team was working with heavy workloads, without sufficient prioritisation and in a business with insufficient consideration to data by design.
She said that there were several hundred reports going out on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis that required a lot of manual intervention and were not as detailed as the organisation needed them to be. There was also the problem of ‘key man risk’ with many old legacy systems that only some people understood.
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