Case Study:

A Top 3 Global Insurance Company Turns to Yellowbrick to Speed Up Claims Processing and Compliance

Yellowbrick Transforms Claims Processing and Compliance for a Top 3 Global Insurance Company

The International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 17, which becomes effective in 2023, represents one of the most significant challenges to insurance accounting in more than 20 years. This profound change in accounting requirements is a huge challenge for insurers across the globe as they assess its impact on requirements for data management, data quality, and data storage.

While some organizations may adopt stopgap measures by shoring up existing data management systems to comply with IFRS 17, many will choose to take a more transformational approach to their IT infrastructure--including their data analytics systems--to ensure they can capture, transform, integrate, store, govern, and analyze massive amounts of data in a flexible, scalable, and efficient way.

In the face of the industry changes required for compliance with IFRS 17, one of the world’s largest insurance companies knew that its existing virtual data warehouse, a patchwork of existing systems, had to be replaced: it lacked the performance of a modern, optimized columnar analytic database; didn’t scale; and was too expensive to maintain.

In March 2019, with the help of Accenture, the company kicked off its process for selecting a consolidated data warehouse to help it meet IFRS 17 standards. Its requirements included high performance, easy expansion, low maintenance, massive data capacity, and automated operations.

Solution

After extensive testing and evaluation, in August 2019, the company chose Yellowbrick over Greenplum, and others for its data warehouse transformation project. During testing, Yellowbrick proved out its ability to enable complex and high-performance data analysis of billions of rows of data (including numerous complex table associations), data consistency, interactive ad hoc, and 24/7 availability. An implementation project began shortly thereafter in coordination with Accenture.

Benchmarking Results for 3 Representative Workloads (in seconds)
5004003002001000
  • 142
    65.9
    5.3
    Workload 1
  • 463
    112.7
    5.8
    Workload 2
  • 404
    33.3
    1
    Workload 3
 
Vendor A
 
Vendor B
 
Yellowbrick (15-node)

Results

In addition to IFRS 17 compliance, Yellowbrick showed dramatic results for other use cases, including:

  • A full cost-breakdown analysis of all policies across multiple lines of business, which took 2 days previously, now takes less than 2 hours with Yellowbrick.
  • Similarly, claims ratio processing that took 2 days now takes 2 hours, during which time Yellowbrick can continue processing concurrent workloads—a task that was impossible before. 
  • Insurance underwriting analysis is now much more accurate because more historical data can be processed than before – with 200+ analysts writing queries concurrently.

Thanks to these improvements deriving from superior performance and scale, the company can now take a transformational approach to data analytics that accelerates virtually every business process across insurance – leading to less risk and improved profitability.

The company is now also in position to become the first insurer in its country to be running IFRS 17-compliant systems, well ahead of the 2023 deadline, and is actively looking for more use cases for Yellowbrick in its business.

Challenges

The company's legacy systems were too slow and expensive to meet compliance requirements for the IFRS 17 standard.

Solution

The company selected Yellowbrick over Greenplum and others to help it prepare for IFRS 17 compliance, enabling complex and high-performance analytics on billions of rows of data, full data consistency, and 24/7 high availability.

Benefits:

  • A full-cost analysis of all policies across multiple lines of business that took two days previously, now takes less than two hours with Yellowbrick.
  • Claims ratio processing that took two days, now takes two hours with Yellowbrick, while Yellowbrick is processing other workloads concurrently - which was impossible before.
  • Insurance underwriting analysis is now much more accurate for 200+ concurrent users because more historical data can be processed than before.
  • The company will be the first insurer in its country running IFRS 17-compliant systems.

Talk to one of our experts today to find out how Yellowbrick can help you.

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