View from the Summit: How Aon is Driving a Competitive Edge with Data and Analytics

Mark Sarbiewski

Chief Marketing Officer, Trifacta

Financial Risk Mitigation and Health Insurance are two critical aspects of our daily lives whose importance cannot be overstated. All of us need strong financial stability as well as the right coverage when it comes to anomalies related to our health. Having the right data to provide timely information, insights, and support for these aspects becomes vital especially during difficult times. Daire Corboy and Giuseppe Tortorici from Aon discussed these topics at the inaugural Wrangle Summit in April 2021 and how they worked with Trifacta to support their customers with the right services based on advanced analytics and business intelligence.

Building a strong foundation

As part of their business, Aon has laid a strong foundation by setting up Aon’s Centers for Innovation and Analytics (ACIA) that form a significant part of the global Aon Data & Analytics Services team. The focus on analytics to drive innovative products to serve the needs of their clients is what differentiates Aon and ACIA from others in the industry. However, it was not a smooth ride. It was insightful to understand the challenges that Aon faced and their eventual strategic direction towards a cloud-based scalable data solution.

Aon’s analyses to address customer requirements

When it comes to insurance, it is important to understand premium payments versus the outlays the insurer pays for insurance claims. This is a critical metric for every insurer and is top of mind for Aon’s client base. Within Aon, it is referred to as premium flow analysis. The primary challenge towards efficient premium flow analyses was the sheer volume of data. Since this involved millions of data points, the computing resources were pushed to their limits. Additionally, data teams needed to run this process manually on a local drive as running the ETL workflow on their original data architecture caused their servers to crash. The entire process proved to be costly (due to the increased number of computing resources), time-consuming (taking more than 5 hours for every run), not meeting compliance requirements (due to manual and local runs), and error-prone. To make matters worse, the process needed to be re-run every time fresh data came in, which happened all the time.

On the financial side, understanding how, why, and when clients were using their financial risk mitigation products was important for Aon to work with their clients for better options and services. This is internally called Risk View Analysis. Using Google Analytics to view customer usage data proved to be challenging as it had to be downloaded and analyzed daily, making it inefficient and time-consuming. Careful coordination was needed between data extraction and loading it into a data lake.

It was imperative to move towards a cloud-based solution that could help with getting the data in the right format and at any scale. And that is where Trifacta came in.

How did Trifacta help Aon?

Trifacta enabled the ACIA team to accelerate the premium flow analysis with speedy retrieval of the required data. Being a cloud-based solution, Trifacta helped with any scale of data and at any rate of arrival. Automating the data refresh and the premium flow analysis dashboard reduced processing times by more than 80% down to less than an hour. Trifacta’s data quality capabilities ensure data accuracy at every stage helping Aon and their customers with precise data.

To deliver efficient risk view analysis, the ACIA team leveraged two key capabilities of Trifacta, namely Parameterization, and Scheduling. Using parameterization, the ACIA team could not only easily download the data from Google Analytics but could also confirm there was no duplicate data, resulting in highly accurate data for analyses. Scheduling enabled the team to automate data processing jobs independently without waiting for every stage of the ETL process. This led to a reduction in running operations by close to 95% down to ten minutes.

Aon continues to make strides in delivering the right services to their clients providing analytics-based insights. It’s our privilege to be on this journey with them.

Now It’s Your Turn

How do you envision serving your customers with data and analytics? Please share your thoughts at comments@trifacta.com