Actian > Case Studies > Split-Second Response Time Moves UK Insurance Carrier to the Top of Customers List

Split-Second Response Time Moves UK Insurance Carrier to the Top of Customers List

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

Europe

Country

United Kingdom

Product

Avalanche Cloud Data Platform

Tech Stack

Amazon Web Services
Hybrid Cloud

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Revenue Growth

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Data Science Services

About The Customer

Established in 1905, the AA is the leading provider of roadside assistance services in the UK. The AA brand is highly trusted, and the vehicles owned by its 3+ million members constitute 10% of the cars on the roads of Britain today. The organization operates a wide variety of businesses, including The AA’s Insurance Brokers Group, which interacts with a diverse panel of underwriters to offer a range of vehicle and home insurance policies.

The Challenge

The AA, a leading provider of roadside assistance services in the UK, needed a solution that would enable it to underwrite a prospective driver and deliver a risk-balanced, competitive insurance quote with sub-second speed. This was particularly important as insurance comparison websites in the UK give top billing to insurers who respond fastest to online requests for quotes. The AA wanted to target and provide highly competitive insurance rates to customers with the best driving records. To do this, they needed to be able to go beyond website provided data and create a more complete risk profile of a driver before determining eligibility and rates. The AA subscribes to multiple services that enable them to validate the information an applicant submits and enrich that information with data the applicant may not have provided.

The Solution

The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform deployed on AWS is used to analyze hybrid data sources to provide real-time insurance quotes and provide executives with performance insights on the AA's insurance business. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform relies on a true column-store database that provides unrivaled capabilities to connect, analyze, and act on big data. It can run in the cloud, on-premises, or - as in the case of the AA - as a hybrid solution. Leveraging the elasticity of the AA's Amazon Web Services cloud environment with the Avalanche platform, the AA was confident it had the scale and flexibility to meet the future growth of its insurance business and would be able to continue to leverage the massive amount of data still stored in on-premises data sources.

Operational Impact

With Avalanche Cloud Data Platform, the AA routinely earns its top position on comparative insurance sites.
The AA can analyze applicant-supplied data, review data from public sources and deliver risk-balanced competitive insurance quotes within fractions of a second.
The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform provided the high concurrency capability necessary to accommodate multiple pricing analysts, data scientists, and executive users using BI dashboards for real-time business insights - best of all, the additional users had no impact on the performance of their online quoting system.

Quantitative Benefit

The AA is able to return a risk-balanced, competitive quote in just 400 milliseconds.
In just five years, the insurance business has grown to nearly half a million active insurance policies, making it one of the AA's most lucrative business units.