Making the Life of 927,000 People Safer

Baloise Insurance

Data isn’t a goal in itself, it’s a way to make better decisions Marc De Coninck Director Finance Transformation Baloise Insurance

Future-proof & performant enterprise analytics solution unlocks full potential of insurance data

Baloise Insurance achieved this using • SAS^® Insurance Analytics Architecture

Setting the scene for analytics

Implementing an enterprise data warehouse with solid visualization tools will help Baloise become a truly data-driven company

As an insurance company, Baloise Insurance owns a lot of data. However, that data has so far been spread throughout the company and not centered around the customer. Connecting 22 source systems to make data gathering faster and more convenient will help to unlock the full potential of the company's ‘small’ data.

Baloise’s goals for data analytics

Provide a future-proof and performant enterprise analytics solution
Increase reporting and analysis efficiency
Be able to react with agility to cross-industry changes
Enable future business growth & profitability

Baloise’s analytical environment

The Belgian entity is the pilot in developing a future-proof analytics solution, whereby data is fed from multiple sources into the data warehouse. Thereby:

SAS is set as the strategic group-wide data warehouse/analytics solution for operational data (insurance policy data, claim data, customer data, premium data). The different business units may not set up new large-scale data warehouse projects based on non-strategic platforms.
Baloise Insurance uses the SAS Insurance Analytics Architecture to cover all needs. This has several features such as an insurance data model, data management and analytics and reporting.
SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Visual Analytics give Baloise Insurance access to powerful analytics and reporting from a point-and-click, menu-driven and wizard-driven tool, while enabling users to visually explore all data.

“Everyone knows that data is the new gold. So the challenge isn’t to convince people within your organization that you have to be prepared for the digital future. The challenge is that no one knows what the new gold will look like.” Marc De Coninck Director Finance Transformation, responsible for the Anabel Project Baloise Insurance

How insights will empower Baloise’s growth

Acquire new clients through better customer understanding, product personalization, tailored pricing and faster response time
Increase up/cross-selling with real-time 360° customer view, better lifecycle understanding and rapidly tailored offerings
Retain good customers by better meeting client expectations, early detection of exit signals and rapidly tailored mitigation actions
Reduce claims by better assessing customer risk profiles and proactively reducing risk

Baloise Insurance is embarking on the data analytics journey

Baloise Insurance has drawn the chalk lines of a performant enterprise-wide analytics solution. With the Anabel project (Analytics for Belgium), Baloise Belgium colorizes the technological framework based on its own needs.

The setup is unique due to its size and complexity. The current scope is to connect 22 source systems with 5 data marts to be defined.
Data analysis is defined as a crucial element in Baloise’s future roadmap. The project therefore has the full support of the CFO and CIO.
To realize the full potential of a data analysis platform, Baloise will need to develop and hire people with the necessary skills and competencies.
A cultural change will also be needed to recognize the full potential of data.
The journey to become a truly data-driven company will result in a competitive advantage. The first use cases have already proved their value.

Baloise Facts & Figures

The lead time of the project will be 2 years

Baloise expects that the implementation of SAS will pay for itself by 2022

First use cases already proved their value and resulted in strong commitment from the business

A bimodal approach for handling small and big data

Initially, Baloise Insurance is focusing on unlocking small data, whereby the insurance company wants to integrate its own data with some well-defined external sources. The creation of this more classical analytical environment is a prerequisite for developing a true big data platform in the future.

Building a performant analytics solution for internal data will lead to:

Achieving more customer centricity
Having a solid solution for the data collection process
Creating the basis for delivering data-driven insights

Although a big data solution is currently out of scope, Baloise is already demonstrating some of the agile capabilities through use case development. This is creating awareness about the value of data. Besides that, it gives the business insights into the future capabilities.

In the future, a true big data platform can support Baloise’s analytics ambitions in terms of volume of data, new types of data and the tremendous computing power the platform can offer. It will work in parallel and close orchestration with the newly created classical analytical platform.

Next steps

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.