Zurich Delivers Trustworthy Data Across All Business Units

Customer Profile

The Zurich Financial Services Group is one of the world's largest insurance based financial services insurance groups, and one of the few to operate on a truly global basis. Zurich Financial Services Australia (Zurich Australia) is a member of the Swiss-based worldwide organization and is the only global financial services group operating in Australia under a single brand in the core business lines of general insurance, life risk, investment and superannuation solutions.

The Australian operation is part of a global network of subsidiaries and offices in North America and Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America and other markets. Zurich employs over 60,000 people helping customers manage risk in more than 170 countries. It is the second-largest insurer of global corporate business.

Zurich Australia is headquartered in North Sydney and has offices country-wide. The main lines of business are divided into two main segments. One offers general insurance solutions to customers such as small businesses, mid-sized and large companies and multinational corporations, primarily through insurance brokers. The other offers life and investment solutions to corporate and personal customers, primarily through financial advisers.

Using up-to-date data to make competitive decisions

The insurance game is big business and every day, Australian businesses and individuals rely on their providers, advisors and brokers to process huge pools of data in order to assess damages, process claims, calculate risks, adjust premiums and receive important advice. Moreover, the accuracy of data gathered at a local level is also crucial for the parent organisation, which is responsible for feeding analytics and trends back to the business on a global level.

Zurich Australia is committed to delivering the highest standard of service to its internal business units, its professional network and to customers. The company aims to differentiate its brand from competitors in part by being recognised as the benchmark source of trusted, quality data in the industry.

Five years ago, and to this end, the company embarked on a project to pull disparate databases into a single data warehouse. The goal since then has been to innovate on the way that data can be accessed, packaged and leveraged to assist various lines of the business and to support competitiveness in the market.

When Hamish Gray was appointed as business intelligence manager, he inherited a number of challenges. The rate of data growth in the business was massive, sitting around 50 percent year on year. This rate of growth had not been matched by the speed at which new services were developed to leverage the data warehouse environment, and there had already been a false start in rolling out a reporting project through one main area of the business. Trust in BI as a platform had been eroded with stakeholders, and ad hoc databases, applications and spreadsheets had once more started to slowly proliferate through the business. This created deficiencies in the source systems that had become a constant focus for the data management team, and single-man dependencies were leaving the business open to operational and strategic risk.

Business Process Improvement

Fast forward by two years and today, MicroStrategy's integrated business intelligence platform has played a valuable role in pulling a firm data governance framework around the organization. The use of ad hoc data sources and reports has been brought under control, and activity is now largely consolidated around the data warehouse. Numerous reporting projects are now up and running, supporting a wide range of applications across multiple insurance and financial lines of business and products.

Automation means the data management team has won back valuable head space to run more analysis and identify new opportunities to utilize available data assets in innovative ways. Trust has been built across the business, with data being drawn upon for claims, underwriting, actuarial modeling, investments and finance, while sales and marketing can now have a better view of cross product interactions.

Compliance is well in hand with anomalies quickly identified and reported through to relevant government agencies in step with anti-money laundering, counterterrorism and fraud requirements. Changes affecting legal documentation such as contracts or product disclosures can be rapidly distributed, helping to keep the information on customer self-service portals such as MyZurich up to the second with accurate information.

Automation of reporting functions means a core team of just four is needed to manage the MicroStrategy toolset whereas previously the team could sometimes scale up to as many as 15 in order to handle end-of-month requirements and ad hoc projects. Now any headcount ramp-up is focused upon projects that deliver strategic benefit to the business, such as how mobility will further enable sales to demonstrate real-time information when they are in the field with brokers and advisors.

Business Benefits

The business intelligence strategy overall is facilitating a cultural shift inside the organisation, where it is more widely recognised that data stewardship and governance is a whole-of-business proposition and not simply an IT function.

According to Hamish Gray, the way business is conducted has also been improved and additional competitive advantage gained. The reports generated through MicroStrategy are now a central management tool for the Life division and the standard of the reporting has reinvigorated the presence of Zurich amongst brokers and advisors.

"There has been a lot of kudos around the reporting packs. Brokers and advisors have been very impressed and there is little doubt our ability to use MicroStrategy in this way has delivered a competitive advantage," says Hamish. 'We've created a significant presence in the industry and Zurich figures are now benchmarking how brokers and advisors are measuring success."

Future Moves

The BI team is continuing with mobility projects and applications to deliver services from the MicroStrategy BI platform out onto smart devices. Hamish is confident the company is now fully leveraging 50 percent of its data and is focused on tapping into the remainder over the next 12 months. Continued finetuning on the reporting to ensure the results are routinely perfect along with technical hardening of the environment and rectifying legacy issues with past systems will also be a focus.