Optimizing Insurance Business Processes with Quality-Powered Data Governance

The client is a leading U.S. mutual life insurer with more than 5 million customers and $32 billion in annual revenue. They offer a wide range of financial products and services, including insurance, annuities, retirement plans, and other employee benefits. As a Fortune 100 company, they have a significant presence in the financial services industry and are known for their comprehensive offerings that cater to both individual and corporate clients. The company has been in operation for nearly 30 years and has established itself as a trusted provider of life insurance and related financial services. Their commitment to quality and customer satisfaction is evident in their continuous efforts to optimize business processes and improve data governance. With a focus on innovation and efficiency, the company has embarked on various initiatives to enhance their data management capabilities, ensuring that they remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market. Their partnership with Precisely highlights their dedication to leveraging advanced data solutions to meet regulatory requirements and build greater confidence in the quality of their data.

Under the direction of the chief data officer (CDO), the company launched an aggressive plan to establish and implement data governance tools, policies and processes across the enterprise. The initial effort included the creation of business glossaries in spreadsheets to document metadata, data ownership, definitions and business attributes policies, in addition to the controls that were implemented as part of the data quality initiative. The company also had a critical need to understand data lineage across systems at a business level, which they managed in a spreadsheet tool integrated with Salesforce. These data governance efforts marked important steps to help both business and technical users better manage, understand and use data, but these largely manual solutions lacked the automation, adoption and sustainability needed from a long-term solution. The company still faced numerous challenges, including: Error-prone spreadsheets requiring constant manual attention to keep current, making collaboration and widespread contribution difficult. Technical metadata from key applications required the development of custom code solutions or had to be imported and catalogued manually. Technical data lineage made it nearly impossible for business users to understand or leverage. Usage rights and utilization for licensed data were hard to trace and account for. Policies and processes around data access, permissions and approvals lacked visibility and accountability across the enterprise. The client reached out to Precisely to help them overcome these challenges and achieve the automation, accountability and sustainability the company needed from a governance program.

Precisely conducted numerous governance workshop sessions with the CDO and governance team to define an iterative governance working model that could be scaled out across the enterprise. According to the team, these data governance sessions were instrumental not just on selecting the correct tooling but to also leverage the skills sets, culture and transformations that were happening at the organization. The governance team indicated that there were several factors that set Precisely apart from the competition, including: Data360 Govern being a business-friendly platform, enabling a self-service approach for both business and IT users. The flexible, robust platform allows users to define, populate and measure various types of complex data assets including data transformations, aggregations and advanced formulas. The solution’s centralized, collaborative interface and workflow provided unprecedented visibility into updates and approvals for every stakeholder. Versatile key connectors automated import of technical metadata from Oracle, Bloomberg, Cognos and other core system applications. In the first phase of implementation, the customer and Precisely established an intuitive data catalog that provided an easily searchable common vocabulary for both business and IT resources to reference. Users can view technical and business-oriented metadata at a glance to learn critical information about the governed artifacts, including ownership, authoritative source, lineage and which data domains use the specific data item. To help business teams more easily understand data movement, the company augmented technical data lineage with easily configurable, visual business lineage. This gives business users the ability to view lineage and data movements at a level of abstraction that makes sense to them without getting caught in the more detailed technical minutiae. Given the importance of metrics in any data management program, Precisely provided out-of-the-box dashboards for qua

• Implemented an enterprise-level data governance and reconciliation solution, replacing manual spreadsheets with automated processes to aid in custodial and subadvisory reconciliation of the general account, while enabling data leaders to better understand, manage and use their data.
• Provided automated workflows, case management and resource assignment to identify, track and confirm issue resolution across the various data sources.
• Reduced the operations overhead and manual intervention in the back-office management process.
• Established a business-friendly, automated data catalog of critical data assets and their impact to the business.
• Automated the collection and cataloging of technical metadata from various core systems and vendors including Cognos, Oracle, Eagle, Bloomberg and Factset.

• The company has more than 5 million customers.
• The company generates $32 billion in annual revenue.