Snowflake talked with Sudaman Thoppan Mohanchandralal of Allianz Benelux at Data Cloud Summit 2020, to hear how the company captures customer insights in the Data Cloud, continually improving its products and services.
For Allianz Benelux, delivering great customer experiences is about working to secure each customer’s future. The company is committed to standing by customers in every situation by offering high-quality insurance and investment management products combined with reliable guidance, support, and care.
From the perspective of Sudaman Thoppan Mohanchandralal, Regional Chief Data and Analytics Officer and AI Researcher for Allianz Benelux, data science is key to success, especially during challenging times and an increasingly strict regulatory environment.
“Having concrete, seamless, and scalable views into customer data is essential to the business,” Mohanchandralal says.
“With solid insights, we can develop creative solutions that offer long-term benefits to our customers and our business.”
High Security by Design in the Cloud
To build out its data strategy while driving efficiency and reducing CapEx, Allianz Benelux planned a move to the cloud. “We knew we needed to grow into the cloud to get the scalability we wanted,” Mohanchandralal says. “At the same time, we knew there would be challenges breaking with the status quo and maintaining security.”
With consumer privacy being paramount, the data analytics team had to prove to management that customer data would be secure. “This meant that we had to understand where data would be exposed and build in the highest levels of security to protect customer privacy and maintain trust,” Mohanchandralal explained. “We also needed to make sure the CapEx savings we achieve in the cloud would not reemerge as operational costs due to new areas of complexity.”
Improving the Flexibility of Data with Snowflake
When it came time to move forward with a well-planned digital transformation, Allianz Benelux decided to partner with Snowflake to virtualize data collection and analytics while achieving the desired performance and elasticity.
“We wanted to go beyond just creating a data lake and instead create a data hub that would enable us to better align with all our customers’ objectives,” Mohanchandralal says. “We also wanted greater flexibility in working with the data we collect. Accomplishing this required us to break down data silos, something that can be incredibly difficult for any organization to do. Fortunately, Snowflake became the agent for us to do exactly that.”
“With the Snowflake Data Cloud in place, we can create a single source of truth and improve data accessibility, discovery, and usefulness.”
Looking Ahead
Allianz Benelux is still early in its cloud journey but looking forward to the possibilities that lie ahead.
“We are still working through the orchestration to ease administration so we can focus on being data analytics experts,” Mohanchandralal concludes. “We’re excited about the cloud journey that we have in front of us. With Snowflake, we have a partner to enable us to progress on our data journey.”
Watch Snowflake’s Data Cloud Summit 2020 fireside chat with Sudaman Thoppan Mohanchandralal.