Surfacing data ingestion and integrity issues

Case Studies
Tim Watson - Partner

"Using the data modelling capabilities of Power BI enabled us to validate their data and financial reporting, providing them with a clear picture of their data landscape."

CLIENT SUCCESS STORY

Company Highlights

Region: USA

Sector: Financials

Industry: Insurance

Division: Operations

Solution Technologies: Microsoft 

Solution Products: Power BI 

Solution Service Type: Project

 

I N T R O D U C T I O N

This insurance business provides liquidity to insurance underwriters and brokers by buying their policies and owning the renewal risk. Their rapidly developed data architecture and SQL warehouse needed to be redesigned, to accommodate their next growth cycle.

Quantifying the size of their existing challenges formed the core of this project-based consulting engagement. They needed some basic reporting to continue existing business development and understand the potential degree of variance in assumed risk.

This client success story explains how issues were surfaced, quantified in order to support the follow-on redesign and development of their enterprise data architecture.

 

H I G H L I G H T S

  • Core persistency and cancelation rate KPIs
  • Identification of data ingestion and ETL issues
  • Quantify scope of re-architecture requirements

C H A L L E N G E S

Accurate and timely pricing of potential new business became increasingly challenging with the existing architecture. The client needed to consume significant transactional datasets provided by underwriters and brokers, in order to calculate a purchase price. The input was, with limited exception, always different and required cleansing and normalisation before deploying pricing and risk modelling.

The SQL based infrastructure and Excel reporting built during the start-up phase satisfied initial needs. As the company experienced
exponential growth this solution moved from an enabler to a delayer of execution. The client recognised they were experiencing more data anomalies,
and this would continue until they could build a more robust solution. With limited internal development resources and without jeopardizing their exceptional commercial growth, this business looked to a 3rd party provider to quantify their data gap.

 

S O L U T I O N

To meet this client’s needs Pomerol built two Power BI reports: The first, an operational reporting dashboard provides a view of their financial position and performance of their investments. This includes modelling of the persistence of their policy portfolio and comparison of the performance against actuarial models. Additionally, forecasting of their liability over the coming year, and financial reports to meet the requirements of their auditors. The goal of the second dashboard was to validate their financial reporting and to highlight any data quality issues. Pomerol rebuilt all the calculations used for their financial reporting metrics in the Power BI data model. This created an independent control against which the data in their own database could be
validated.

 

S T A K E H O L D E R S

The project was initiated and approved by the CEO. Immediate business as usual support was provided by their lead SQL developer. The primary requirement was getting basic operational KPIs in play to support business decision making. The secondary ask was to size the problem in redesigning their architecture.

 

R E S U L T

The Power BI reports gave our client live visibility of their financial position and confidence in their investment models. The data validation exercise confirmed that their current data infrastructure would not meet their long-term needs and justified the investment in building an enterprise data warehouse

 

A B O U T  P O M E R O L

We create and deliver meaningful Data-Driven Business Focused Solutions & Services. We’ve been operating in Data Analytics and Intelligence Reporting for over 8 years within Pomerol and our Partners have a cumulative 100 years in Global Experience. Pomerol partners with our clients to optimise the intersect between changing business demands, technological progress and sustainable business growth.

 

 

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