Challenger Drives Retiree Financial Security with AI and Data Transformation

Data is very important to the Challenger business, and that's around the fact that we do a lot of investment. So understanding the decisions around investments and then any investment risks. So ensuring that we can actually get the best return and support to retirees.

We had a really complex technology stack around our data platform. Some of the, um, key pain points they'd had in the past was actually finding the data, knowing what to trust, because there was multiple sources. Looking through at some of the key drivers.

Having Snowflake as a platform was cost reduction, simplification, looking for one platform that's actually in the cloud. I think some of the other parts was self-service for us. And then also, um, you know, the whole Python environment, Snowpark, um, and and some of those capabilities. We didn't really have to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure or setting up or maintaining, that that's just been taken care of by Snowflake.

Accenture is our partner from a technology point of view. A year ago, we made the decision to partner with them to look after all our technology, but also then provide, you know, additional capability and additional support for us.

The way our relationship with Challenger has evolved is we started off taking on the IT that they were already running, and then they started a number of transformational initiatives, one of which was the Data Transformation Initiative, which Snowflake is a part of. So, we picked that up and we started working with them on that about 12 months or so ago.

Snowflake is a fantastic data and AI platform, and the technology is really amazing. I think where Accenture really brings a lot of value into the partnership is when we bring the industry perspective and the business value to that equation, because their technology, together with our industry knowledge, is a really powerful combination.

Accenture being our technology partner and having a lot of expertise around that is definitely helping us to enable that or to ensure that we can actually utilize Snowflake to the best of our ability.

One of the things that the business is really excited about specifically around AI are utilizing AI within the platform. Don't have to worry about creating reports, dashboards. Utilize AI to actually ask, you know, the questions and get the value out of the data. And the other part of it is around a data catalog. In the past, we would have had a catalog, you would have had to populate that catalog. But now with AI, I can just ask the question, and AI will figure that out for me.

I had a comment from from one of the business users the other day where they went, "Oh wow, data is just there. I didn't have to speak to IT, you know, and it's fast and it's updated." That's some of the things that we're looking forward to, to be able to utilize AI capability within Snowflake.