Foundry Center of Excellence
Major Swiss Insurance Company
Supported the creation of a Foundry CoE by helping create solid bases, training internal employees, and delivering high impact projects on the new platform
Challenge
- Contract signed by client with Palantir to use Foundry as their analytics platform
- Lack of internal employees skilled on this new platform
- Wanted Foundry to be widely adopted within all analytics projects and workflows in the company
Solution
- Helped create CoE to manage and encompass all projects delivered on Foundry
- Unit8 delivered many projects, built shared libraries and aided in the training of employees
- CoE Responsibilities:
- Governance
- Enabling efficient usage
- Sharing best practices, upskilling, training
Business Impact
- Enabled all BUs to tackle big data projects efficiently
- Created solid bases for future projects by building libraries and training internal employees
- Increased usage of Foundry as analytical platform compared to existing, less efficient solution
Summarization and Q&A Assistant to streamline Risk Operations
Swiss Insurance
A solution based on Azure Open AI & Cognitive Search allowing users to easily understand thousands of risk documents and policies with human-like answers
Challenge
- With thousands of internal and external risk policy documents staying up to date and understanding which policies apply to which scenarios is challenging
- These insights were spread across multiple sources including PDF’s, Wiki’s, Sharepoint, Excel and others
Solution
- Information relevant to a user question are identified and retrieved using Azure Cognitive Search.
- The retrieved articles are fed to Azure OpenAI services. The output consists of a summary with references to documents used in the answer.
- The scope of the retrieved documents and the chatbot responses is limited to the customers internal documents.
Business Impact
- Speeding up information retrieval and summarizing key insights from a large amount of structured and unstructured data
- On client demand, information can be extended to other public sources or increase the internal sources of a company’s data
Insurance Contract Analytics
Swiss Insurance Company
Creating an Azure distributed cluster to analyze and assess risk exposure in insurance based on intelligence extracted from contracts
Challenge
- High legal costs due to delayed understanding of contract content are a major cost factor
- Millions of insurance contracts with different wording, exclusion and inclusion clauses
- Difficult to categorize and quantify risk profile of grops of contracts
Solution
- Natural Language Processing solution to analyze contracts
- Contract corpus data lake implementing business rules for contract intelligence risk resolution
- Backend system for underwriters to better formulate future contracts and reduce risk exposure
Business Impact
- Client is able to quickly quantify risk exposure based on contract language
- Underwriters following guidance system resulting in more profitable contracts.
- Reduced legal and operational costs and improved process excellence
Analytics Maturity Assessment
Major Swiss Insurance Company
Conducted 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
Business 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 Governance Framework
Major 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
- Several factors suggesting that a framework to oversee analytics model governance was needed
- Upcoming regulations
- Improve collaboration
- Operational and reputational risks
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
Business Impact
- Mitigation of operational, financial, legal & reputational risks from analytics solutions through best-in class governance practices
- Standardised and more efficient development practices
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
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
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 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
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
Claim risk scoring
Leading Swiss insurance company
Detecting potential claim fraud among health insurance clients
Challenge
- Undetected fraudulent insurance claims may cause a significant blow to insurance companies’ revenues
Solution
- Implemented fraud scoring KPI’s together with visualisation
- Enabled multiple insurance companies to use the API to validate claims of their customers
- Ensured auditability and idempotency of the results
Impact
- Automated the fraud-flagging process
- Created tools allowing enhanced manual inspection of the most suspicious claims for multiple companies
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