Forte Insurance Strengthens Its Data Foundation to Improve Operations

Established in 1999, Forte Insurance is Cambodia's largest general insurer, with 45% market share and a rapidly growing life insurance business. With a culture rooted in innovation and customer service, the insurer aims to financially empower people and businesses in emerging Southeast Asian markets.

Despite its market leadership, Forte Insurance faced challenges in leveraging data effectively. Information was fragmented across multiple systems, limiting the company's ability to fully optimize its operations, drive better decision-making and deliver superior customer experiences.

“We saw extensive opportunities to enhance how we utilized data, including accelerating our responsiveness to business units, customers and regulators,” Jeremy Ng, Group Chief Technology Officer at Forte Insurance, says.

Forte Insurance elected to modernize its data architecture by deploying a platform that would serve as the foundation of its transformation project. The platform would need to address fragmentation and inefficiency by operating as a single source of truth and complement the company’s legacy on-premises OLTP core system database. Additionally, it would have to support the seamless operation of newly launched front-end applications.

Forte Insurance evaluated a range of cloud-based data platforms, prioritizing fast time-to-value and future scalability, modularity and cost-efficiency throughout the process. The business ran several proofs of concept (PoCs) for shortlisted products and quickly identified Snowflake as the best fit for its requirements. 

Snowflake’s cloud-agnostic design, which seamlessly integrated with Forte Insurance’s existing AWS ecosystem, offered flexibility for future multi-cloud deployments, allowing the company to scale and adapt as business needs evolve. Further, Snowflake’s standard and native connectors would empower Forte Insurance to create a flexible and resilient data ecosystem.

Snowflake’s intuitive interface and native SQL capabilities also met Forte Insurance’s ease-of-use requirements. The platform aligned seamlessly with the company's in-house SQL proficiency, enabling technical teams to engage with it effortlessly. With a short learning curve, those teams quickly adapted to the new solution, significantly accelerating the transition from PoC to full-scale deployment.

Adoption of Snowflake’s cloud-based data platform has been transformative for Forte Insurance, driving significant improvements in processing speed, workflow efficiency and real-time data accessibility. Business users now have instant access to critical insights, enabling faster decision-making and improved operational agility.

Integrating front-end systems, such as customer and intermediary portals, with Snowflake has transformed stakeholder interactions, enhancing visibility and providing seamless access to information. A key driver of this transformation is the use of data marts, which optimize query performance and significantly improve response times for these applications. Data marts are simplified subsets of data warehouses that focus on specific lines of business or departments. They offer optimized query performance and significantly improved response times. 

“These specialized marts ensure that business users, including underwriters, claims teams and field surveyors, can quickly retrieve relevant data without performance bottlenecks,” says Ng. “Previously, an offsite motor insurance surveyor querying policy details experienced delays of 30 seconds or more. However, with Snowflake’s optimized data marts, the same query takes less than five seconds. 

“This significantly enhances field operations, allowing surveyors to process claims faster, improve customer experience and reduce turnaround times.”

Forte Insurance has also found considerable improvements in its analytics processes thanks to Snowflake’s result caching functionality, which stores the results of previously executed queries for 24 hours when the underlying data remains unchanged. By combining this functionality with the standardization of common dashboard and report queries, along with programs to educate users about best practices for query crafting, the organization found that about 60% of daily queries were served directly from the result cache. This reduced average response times by up to 60%.

Business users could access reports and dashboards almost instantaneously, with compute costs dropping by 40% as fewer queries required full execution on virtual warehouses. In addition, the technology team could handle about 35% more report requests without requiring additional resources. “We expect these performance improvements to increase over time, both in terms of runtime efficiency and overall value,” says Ng. “As we roll out more advanced analytics and reporting solutions in the coming quarters, the benefits of result caching will become even more significant due to the higher computational demands of these complex reports.”

By integrating Power BI with Snowflake, Forte Insurance has unlocked a new level of data-driven decision-making, fostering collaboration and strategic alignment across the organization. The wait time for refreshed Power BI reports has been reduced from 12 minutes to near real time, enabling business leaders to make faster, more-informed decisions based on up-to-date insights.

Following the successful integration of its legacy core system and front-end, customer-facing applications with Snowflake, Forte Insurance plans to extend integration to its modernized claims management platform, customer relationship management system and document management system. This will enable seamless data ingestion, consolidation and accessibility within a centralized cloud-based platform, enabling real-time data flows across stakeholders.

These new and existing integrations also establish a robust foundation for future AI and machine learning adoption. This will unlock advanced capabilities such as predictive modeling, fraud detection and automated claims processing — driving greater precision, efficiency and operational agility.