Emirates Insurance Drives Sustainable Profitability with AI-Powered Automation
With Snowflake, Emirates Insurance cuts administrative burden, boosts customer and broker insights and makes the most of modern AI capabilities to drive profitability.
30-40%Faster motor claims registration with AI
380Hours of work automated over 3 months
Industry
Financial ServicesLocation
Abu Dhabi, United Arab EmiratesDelivering sustainable profitability by augmenting historical insurance expertise with data and AI innovation
The insurance industry sits at the intersection of the past and the future. Experienced human underwriters must use their industry knowledge and domain expertise to properly evaluate risks and reassure customers that their assets are protected. But at the same time, data-driven innovation and modern AI technologies now play an essential role in driving efficiency and profitability.
Few insurers understand this critical blend of old and new like Emirates Insurance. Operating across the United Arab Emirates for over 40 years, the insurance provider has a reputation for accurate underwriting and strong broker relations across its commercial lines, retail and international business. But it knew that while human experience is still essential, it needs to work alongside new technologies to ensure profitable growth in an increasingly data-driven world.
“Our aim is to double our revenue while ensuring continued profitability and innovation,” explains Carlos Piedade, Head of Digital Strategy and Transformation at Emirates Insurance. “There’s just no way to achieve this if you don’t have the modern data capabilities needed to automate.”
To reach this level of automation and spearhead a wider digital transformation process, Emirates Insurance deployed Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, running on Azure. Now, it can combine human experience with the latest data technologies to streamline processes, better understand its brokers and customers, and redefine insurance with next-generation AI tools — all while complying with data sovereignty regulations thanks to Snowflake’s locally hosted servers in the UAE.
Story highlights
Saving valuable time across teams: With a powerful, modern data platform, Emirates Insurance streamlines reconciliation and other processes through extensive automation across all business functions.
Enhancing broker relations and customer retention: Unified data delivers 360-degree visibility of customer and broker activities, helping teams improve relations and retention.
- Building a foundation for faster, better services through AI capabilities: By automatically ingesting documents and other unstructured data, AI helps accelerate claims and quoting to improve services and spur future growth.
Preparing for a more profitable future with an automated, trusted data environment
Working with Snowflake partner In516ht, Emirates Insurance began its journey from legacy, on-premises data systems to a more consolidated, modern and automated data and AI platform.
“The impacts of our legacy platform were extensive,” recalls Piedade. “There was significant manual effort required from all business units to get insights, we didn’t have proper visibility of customer and broker behavior, and there was an overall lack of trust that data was fresh and accurate. This also forced business and operations teams to rely on manual workarounds, which ultimately proved frustrating and inefficient for users.”
To solve these challenges and prepare for the future, Piedade and the data team at Emirates Insurance built a new data platform based on Snowflake, running on Azure. The AI Data Cloud integrates with Qlik for analytics workloads, data build tool (dbt) for transformations and Dagster for orchestration to unify insights and streamline workloads. And crucially, as Snowflake offers local deployments within the region, Emirates Insurance can simplify compliance with strict data sovereignty rules.
Snowflake was an obvious choice for us, as many tools either couldn’t offer us data sovereignty or required niche, specialist skills. As an SQL-first platform, I knew Snowflake would make it easy to recruit and upskill talent, while offering the agility we needed to launch new use cases for customers and employees.”
Carlos Piedade
Head of Digital Strategy and Transformation at Emirates Insurance
Boosting retention with a 360-degree view of insurance brokers and customers
Emirates Insurance provides policies to customers both directly and through insurance brokers. Delivering truly great experiences through both routes to market requires deep insights into customer and broker experiences.
“While individual relationship managers knew their brokers well, it took a tool like Snowflake to structure our data so we could offer true broker insights enterprise-wide — and really understand how all customers were using our policies,” says Piedade.
In the past, the Emirates Insurance data team needed to manually build APIs to help analysts connect to core systems and get the customer and broker data they needed. But now, all departments can easily access trusted, verified insights in Snowflake.
Already, these insights are starting to help teams across Emirates Insurance nurture relationships to improve broker and customer satisfaction — and create the kinds of experiences that result in repeat business and improved profitability.
Great data also plays a vital role in reducing risk and enhancing underwriting intelligence. By unifying policy data in Snowflake, Emirates Insurance can now analyze policies in specific locations to assess overall portfolio risk in the case of localized storm or flood events, for example. In addition to lower risk, this leads to even better policy pricing for customers.
Accelerating time to insight with automation and AI
Emirates Insurance has also started to make the most of AI and automation tools within Snowflake to get business-defining insights ready faster than ever before.
For example, the team has been able to automate reconciliation processes to the point where it saved 380 hours over a three-month period.
Similarly, AI-powered optical character recognition removes the manual burden from critical processes like analyzing police incident reports, verifying customer identities and reading vehicle license plates — saving valuable time and removing transcription errors to enhance data quality.
“That creates a win-win situation for everyone,” says Piedade. “Documentation processes that used to take days of back and forth are now instant. We can process these claims 30-40% faster, allowing us to offer more responsive services, accelerate service level agreements and improve our relationships with customers and brokers.”
These initial AI wins have created strong momentum for scaling further AI efforts. And because Snowflake hosts servers in the UAE, Emirates Insurance was able to harness these AI tools within Snowflake, while complying with strict data sovereignty regulations.
Snowflake’s roadmap was really clear. When we saw how they were talking about AI, and how the tools are constantly evolving, we knew it was a partner we could build and grow with successfully.”
Carlos Piedade
Head of Digital Strategy and Transformation at Emirates Insurance
Pursuing even more sustainable growth through automation
Emirates Insurance continues to make the most of its human expertise and data-driven capabilities. And with Snowflake, it’s able to enhance both with enriched insights and comprehensive automation.
The company is already beginning to use these tools to automate key processes that will improve decision-making, efficiency and customer and broker satisfaction. But this is just the beginning, as it plans to keep maturing its data model and analytics capabilities to expand beyond claims and policy automation.
“We’re working with partners and students to develop new AI use cases,” says Piedade. “We’ve begun testing an internal chatbot that helps underwriters dig deeper into policies in natural language, and an automated quote intake tool to get quotes to brokers immediately.”
“Snowflake has been amazing to work with,” says Piedade. “Their team in the Middle East has been incredible, the platform offers the flexibility we need and our colleagues constantly tell us how much they appreciate Snowflake’s tools.”
