Federale Verzekering-Assurance deploys cloud analytics to unlock the power of data in insurance

Federale Verzekering-Assurance is a Belgian insurance company with more than 100 years of experience. During that century, the organization has certainly seen many changes in the world of insurance. However, nothing compares to the speed of developments in recent years. Meeting the rapidly evolving expectations of customers has become a real challenge for financial companies. For example, people want fast access to services at any given moment and on any device.

Therefore, Federale Verzekering-Assurance wanted a platform that is always up-to-date and grows with the needs of the company to support fast and user-friendly solutions. In addition, insurers such as Federale Verzekering-Assurance often deal with highly sensitive customer data and must install solid security measures that comply with all privacy regulations.

Fruitful partnerships

To meet these new requirements while keeping focus on its core business, Federale Verzekering-Assurance decided to embark on a long-term cloud journey. “To optimize and expand our customer services, we needed to migrate our activities to a single shared platform that we can use for strategic or operational analysis and for monitoring, as well as for more advanced analytics”, says Nyembo Risasi, Head of Change at Federale Verzekering-Assurance.

Federale Verzekering-Assurance reached out to business & data intelligence company LACO, and analytics leader SAS. On the one hand, LACO guided Federale Verzekering-Assurance from the very beginning of the process by determining the best strategy, working out a road-map and implementing the solution. On the other hand, SAS leveraged its recent partnership with Microsoft to provide a data & analytics platform fully operated and managed on Microsoft Azure. The project also benefited from the in-depth cloud expertise from the Mechelen-based company First IT who will keep the service up and running together with SAS.

Ariane Berckmoes, Chief Technology Officer at Federale Verzekering-Assurance: “We believe in the power of fruitful partnerships, one of our core values as a mutual and cooperative enterprise. A successful cloud journey requires a clear roadmap. But even when you know what to do, you still need the right partners and skills to get there. Once the solution was defined, the deployment went incredibly fast. After only six weeks, the front-end elements of the platform were up and running. That proves the strength of our collaboration.”

Fabrice Deprez, Managing Director of LACO: “Federale Verzekering-Assurance is an early adopter of cloud analytics technology. Not many companies are successful in implementing a project of this scale. There are many variables that can cause it to fail, but our strong partnership provided the glue to keep all different layers together. Federale Verzekering-Assurance, SAS, First IT and LACO are all operating on Belgian soil and have the much-needed local expertise.”

Benoit Van Laethem, Client Executive for Insurance & Bank at SAS: “SAS has invested a lot in its new cloud-native platform SAS Viya®. It’s a modern and future-proof foundation which supports an extended list of data & analytics use cases in the insurance business, ranging from data management, reporting, dynamic pricing, customer intelligence to fraud detection or AI-driven process automation. To reap the benefits of analytics, you need a solid data layer, a performant analytics engine and the ability to operationalize your decisions directly into your business processes. This complete lifecycle is fully covered by SAS.”

Benefits

Today, the front end of the platform at Federale Verzekering-Assurance has been fully migrated to Microsoft’s cloud. In the next phase, the back end containing the data foundation will be moved. The insurance company is already experiencing the benefits of the solution:

• An up-to-date platform guaranteeing that applications are always up and running.
• Improved performance, and scalability to grow with company needs.
• Fast access to insights that help improve customer services.
• A modern solution that enables the highest security standards.

Not only the speed of the solution on the Microsoft’s Azure cloud has satisfied Federale Verzekering-Assurance, but also its cost efficiency, on-demand scalability and reliability. “The solution has really improved the way we do business. It shows the impact of making the right choices at the right moment and with the right partners”, says Amandine Rouvroy, Head of Business Intelligence Competence Center at Federale Verzekering-Assurance.

What Federale Verzekering-Assurance has achieved over the past year is really inspiring and refreshing. We often hear companies talk about a cloud strategy, but only few were able to deliver it so fast. Now Federale Verzekering-Assurance has a modern cloud architecture with access to their data warehouse. This provides insights that help them to better go to the market, and prepare new uses cases like fraud detection, improving internal operations and offering better services to their customers.

Erik Kerkhofs, Commercial Partner Lead at Microsoft BeLux concludes: “I’m very excited to see that the global partnership with SAS, in combination with strong Azure competences provided by our local partner LACO, leads to Federale Verzekering-Assurance’s success.”

Amandine Rouvroy (left), Head of Business Intelligence Competence Center at Federale Verzekering-Assurance and Ariane Berckmoes (right), Chief Technology Officer at Federale Verzekering-Assurance

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