Analytics Governance Framework
Swiss Insurance company
Developing a comprehensive governance framework combining findings from a maturity assessment, ISO standards and sector best practices
Challenge
- No existing framework defining the ideal state and goal of the advanced analytics governance efforts
Solution
- Co-designed a comprehensive ideal governance framework that set a target for the governance and analytics efforts in the organisation
- Framework developed based on previous maturity assessment, ISO standards and external best practices
Impact
- Mitigation of operational, financial, legal & reputational risks from analytics solutions through best-in class governance practices
- Standardised and more efficient development practices
Accelerator #1 Data assets management
Major Swiss Bank
Challenge
- Difficulties maintaining code and monitoring data health
- Making assumptions leading to incorrect outputs
- Need to reimplement existing pieces of software
- Big overhead to integrate new data sources for each use-case
Solution
- Trusted, opinionated and reliable code assets that define guidelines and enforce compliance
- Code modules that allow downstream users to consume and interpret data assets
Impact
- Reduced time to onboard new data assets
- Reduced human errors thanks to guideline enforcement
- Increased transparency about availability and content of data assets
- Ensured common understanding of the data model, allowing to scale data asset development efforts
Rogue Traders Monitoring
Major Swiss Bank
Developing an ML model to identify potential rogue traders and flag them to minimise risk of financial losses and lower need for regulatory cash reserves
Challenge
- Inability to monitor and identify traders whose behaviour differs from what is expected, resulting in potential monetary and reputational risks for the client
Solution
- Integrated trading data from several sources into a single platform
Deployed ML techniques to identify potential rogue traders based on their trading behaviour - Configured an alerting system to flag traders with an elevated risk of rogue trading
Impact
- Able to quickly identify risky traders based on their trading activities, which would have been impossible to do manually
- Minimised rogue trading risk and potential financial losses, lowering the need for regulatory cash reserves
Tableau Server Integration
Major Swiss Bank
Designing and integrating Tableau to enable secure access to datasets stored on the main Foundry instance
Challenge
- Need to enable a wide pool of users to have access to vast datasets stored in a Foundry instance
Solution
- Designed and integrated a Tableau server with Postgres and Postgate
- Foundry datasets can now be accessed through tableau while preserving security standards present in Foundry
Impact
- More than 300 Tableau developers and users now able to securely access and consume the datasets directly from Tableau
Supply Chain Control Tower
International Reseller
Building a tool to provide a 360° view over the whole supply chain, coupled with an alerting system when a certain material is reaching low stock levels
Challenge
- Recurrent struggle with materials being out of stock resulting in significant loss in sales
Solution
- Built application enabling users to see the whole supply chain, either globally or per material
- Implemented an alerting system that reports when a certain stock level is low and will soon need replenishment
Impact
- Reduction of average out-of stock levels at a given point in time by about 50%
- Lowered loss of turnover due to materials being out of stock
Reporting Automation
Swiss Insurance company
Creating automatic reporting tools through data centralisation, eliminating tedious and repetitive tasks anc increasing quality of reports
Challenge
- An insurance company creates quarterly financial reports. They were manually extracting data, exchanging it via emails back and forth for aggregation in Excel and further validation
Solution
- Ingestion of the source data to the data lake and implementation of the pipeline to validate and clean the data.
- UI application was built to streamline the process reporting process by giving access to all parties and allowing modifications if necessary
Impact
- Eliminated the repetitive and tedious manual process, reducing the amount of time needed to create reports
- Improved the quality of reports by reducing the margin of human error
Platform Performance Optimisation
Major Swiss Bank
Optimising platform performance with a set of tools and best-practices combined with coaching, resulting in lower costs and smoother user experience
Challenge
- Platform adoption skyrocketed and rate of increase is higher than what new hardware added is capable of handling
- Usage expected to keep climbing as more projects are being onboarded, leading to further cost increase and performance degradation
Solution
- Established performance metrics baseline
- Coached client’s engineers to enable them to improve platform performance
- Created tooling and reports to pinpoint performance problems and allow self-service improvements
Impact
- Reduction in new hardware addition and maintenance costs
- Increase in platform performance resulting in smoother user experience
Ontology normalisation
Swiss Insurance company
Normalising existing ontology and migrating to a new standardised ontology version
Challenge
- Existing Ontology too large, makes it hard to manage and analyse
Solution
- Normalised existing tables by splitting them into multiple units
- Built toolkits and ontology library to support development of new ontologies
- Conventions and development guidelines
- Performance optimisation and reporting
Impact
- Normalised 3 tables resulting in final ontology of 18 tables (approx. 2.3B rows)
- 30% reduction in total ontology build time
- 60% reduction in disk spillage
Live Contract Renewal Dashboard
Swiss Insurance company
Creating a live contract renewal dashboard allowing underwriters and region directors to have a better understanding of trends and current contract status
Challenge
- Create live dashboard and weekly report to track contract renewal progress
Solution
- Built a big data pipeline to track contract status progress and calculate year-to-year metrics
- Developed application to visualise live data
- Created charts enabling easy visualisation of contract renewal status within the market
Impact
- Underwriters are now able to see live data and adjust contract pricing
- High-level automated reports allow region directors to have a better understanding of current trends and statuses of contracts
Gas Pipe Corrosion Protection
US energy company
Implementing Foundry workflow automating part of the manual process to facilitate entry and reviewing of gas infrastructure maintenance data
Challenge
- Client needs to provide a report about the monitoring of their gas infrastructure to regulators
- Measurement data about infrastructure exists solely on paper and ML implementation is limited by legal requirement to check data manually
Solution
- Workflow established in Foundry to facilitate the control process of the measurement data
Impact
- Measurement data entry and review process facilitated by Foundry workflow
- Projected reduction in man hours of 30%, representing a saving of 10k man hours in total
Foundry Onboarding
Nutrition startup
Onboarding a company on Foundry by providing personalised coaching and helping them implement an initial use case
Challenge
- Company recently acquired Foundry and the engineers lack the knowledge to launch an initial project
Solution
- Provided coaching to the engineers to teach them how to use Foundry’s capabilities
- Helped the engineers launch an initial project and create a minimum viable product
Impact
- Empowered internal engineers to use Foundry to its full potential on their own
Completed end-to-end implementation of a minimum viable product, from data ingestion to dashboards
Energy Contract Valuation
German energy trading company
Enabling contract profitability computation and insight at the individual contract level
Challenge
- Little insight on the profitability of at the individual contract level
- Need to extend contract monitoring capabilities and provide individual profitability metrics
Solution
- erformed a standard ETL process in Palantir Foundry to allow profitability computation at individual contract level
Impact
- Enabled monitoring and improved decision-making capabilities for new contracts and contract extensions
- Created basis for reduction of potential losses on trading contracts
Commodity Trade Finance (CTF) Dashboard
Major Swiss Bank
Creating a dashboard unifying all trading information resulting in a more holistic understanding for credit risk officers and substantial risk reduction
Challenge
- Credit risk officers struggle to understand precisely who they are trading with, what kind of goods are traded, and what are the exposure concentrations
Solution
- Created a dashboard presenting an interactive view of the CTF portfolio and its clients to mitigate risks and recognize business opportunities
- Entity resolution (based on free text sources) to provide a unified view of all external parties involved in the transactions
Impact
- More holistic understanding of CTF business across departments
- Substantial risk reduction through better understanding of exposures
Analytics Maturity Assessment
Swiss Insurance company
Conducting a comprehensive maturity assessment of analytics capabilities, allowing for better future strategic planning and increased transparency
Challenge
- A global insurance company was facing different levels of analytics maturity across its business units and had little visibility on the existing capabilities, tools, standards and project roadmaps.
Solution
- Co-developed and conducted a comprehensive analytics maturity assessment by means of a written questionnaire and follow-up interviews.
- Many dimensions were considered, including analytics strategy, design and ethics.
Impact
- Substantial gains in transparency for the client on its existing capabilities.
- Results served as a baseline for future group-wide strategy initiatives regarding analytics, such as strategic workforce planning or analytics governance.
Analytics Center of Excellence
Swiss Insurance company
Supporting a strategic initiative to migrate current pipelines and use cases to the Foundry platform
Challenge
- Need to offer company-wide support in the transition from old systems to Foundry
- Multiple teams without prior Foundry knowledge needed to move their pipeline and use cases on the platform
Solution
- Multiple support processes depending on the needs
- Support including: office hours, architecture reviews, pair programming, implementation & handover, code reviews, operational support, etc.
Impact
- Supported strategic migration to Foundry, onboarding new users and setting up data foundations
- Platform usage increased from 2’000 to 5’000 users
- Provided support for 25+ projects
- CoE team grew from 2 to 10+ people in 2 years
Airlines Data Platform Onboarding
Airplane producer
Onboarding airlines across 3 continents on a central data analytics platform with activities such as training and enablement of new users
Challenge
- Need for airlines’ data scientists and executives to explore data independently and be able to implement new use cases on their own
Solution
- Prepared educational material, such as presentations and project examples
- Gave lectures and conducted workshops to train new users to use the Foundry platform
Impact
- Enabled new users to acquire new skills allowing them to implement future use cases and to analyse data independently
Aircrafts Predictive Maintenance
Airplane producer
Implementing a data platform to centralise maintenance data from hundreds of airlines and enable predictive maintenance models
Challenge
- Integrate data from 100s of airlines on a single platform
- Reduce or eliminate operational interruptions and minimise the number of aircrafts immobilised due to unforeseen maintenance needs
Solution
- Integrated sensor data and telemetry into central data lake
- Developed predictive maintenance model outputting the probability of maintenance need in the next 5 flights for each aircraft
Impact
- Notable improvement in speed of problem detection, triaging and resolution
- Enabled feedback loop to aircraft design teams to prevent similar issues from reoccurring
Exposure analytics
Leading Swiss insurance company
Creating an application to present a heatmap of insured value allowing to easily spot overexposed areas and limit financial losses due to natural disasters
Challenge
- Existing struggle to identify overexposed areas, either in terms of total insured value or per given peril
Solution
- Creation of an application to present a heatmap of insured value, either total or per peril, for all granularity levels (country, region, etc.)
- Integrated many filtering options allowing for deeper analysis in certain areas if necessary
Impact
- Client is able to quickly spot overexposed areas and coordinate with underwriters to either stop offering insurance for items in this area, or change the pricing
- Lowering of financial risk in the event of a natural disaster
Client Surveillance
Large Swiss bank
Defining and implementing a surveillance framework to identify illegal client behaviour resulting in greatly improved ability to meet surveillance requirements
Challenge
- Regulations require the client to setup surveillance for money laundering and illegal activities
- Disparate data sources, and diversity in regulations between countries
- Inability to monitor client behaviour to spot illegal activities
Solution
- Leveraging a previous project Unit8 conducted (Single Client View), built a generic framework enabling data scientists to easily define surveillance scenarios to monitor potential high-risk client activities
Impact
- Greatly reduced amount of time needed to define surveillance scenarios, from weeks to minutes
- Reduced resources required and build-time of pipelines by more than 50%
- Improved reliability of scenarios
Climate risk scoring
Swiss Insurance company
Developing a climate risk scoring model scalable to the entire insurance portfolio and able to determine climate risk exposure in real time for any locations
Challenge
- Current climate risk scoring model is limited
- Scoring too time-consuming and inability to score for many locations at once
- Model needs to be scaled to the whole insurance portfolio
Solution
- Implemented new model in Big Data environment capable of ingesting high volumes of data
- Used external weather model to predict climate risk score and estimate impact on insurance portfolio
Impact
- High performance model now allowing to evaluate climate risk scores in real time
- Ability to display climate risk scores for any of the more than 2B locations in the insurance portfolio
Financial health watchlist
Swiss Financial Institution
Developing a centralised solvency and risk assessment model to create risk exposure reports automatically and improve data quality
Challenge
- Difficulty to predict total exposure to financial losses resulting from companies at risk of becoming insolvent
- Current risk reports are generated manually and data quality is not guaranteed
Solution
- Central gathering and processing of the relevant partner data allowing for central risk modelling and data quality checks
- Automatic creation of monthly risk reports based on the curated data
Impact
- Improved risk management capabilities through information centralisation and standardisation
- Improvement in data quality and report generation
- Possibility to create reports dynamically to visualise more aspects than before
User behaviour monitoring
Major Swiss bank
Problem
- Impared visibility of user activity and behaviour allows for malicious behaviour to be undetected for a long period of time
- Compliance group in a global private bank decides to monitor user activity on the central data platform
Solution
- Introduction of dynamic altering and anomaly detection system including enhanced signal information via integration of new sources of data (HR data, badge swipes, VPN logs, … )
Impact
- Greatly improved security, audit and monitoring capabilities of the platform team
- Decreased risk of malicious behaviour remaining undetected
Single Client View
International Swiss Bank
Creating a single client view for an international Swiss bank allowing them to track and compute total risk exposure, and meet compliance regulations
Challenge
- Siloed data across multiple systems
- Inability to calculate risk exposure
- Limited ability to meet compliance regulations
- Sub-optimal conditions to apply proper AML
Solution
- Aggregated, cross-referenced and combined data from hundreds of disparate data sources
- Used ML to automatically surface high-risk clients
- Implemented a scalable solution to account for future needs
Impact
- Achieved single client view, increasing visibility
- Able to calculate overall risk exposure
- Compliance regulations can be met