CUSTOMER STORIES
Northbridge Financial Streamlines Regulatory Reporting and Analytics
Since migrating to Snowflake on Microsoft Azure, this leading insurance group has improved regulatory reporting while empowering every enterprise user with data-driven insights using Microsoft Power BI.
Industry
Financial ServicesLocation
Toronto, CanadaStory highlights
- Faster data access and processing across the enterprise: After migrating to Snowflake on Azure, Northbridge now has the speed and processing power needed to handle billions of data records faster, allowing teams to answer questions and provide information to various departments, including financial and regulatory.
- Higher data quality, better trust: Snowflake and Power BI have helped Northbridge build a data ecosystem with guardrails to maintain good data quality and accuracy, which has improved trust and credibility.
- Increased efficiency through AI innovation: With Cortex AI, enterprise users now chat directly with their data using natural language, simplifying data access and powering data-driven decision-making.
Video Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated
Being data-driven, decision-driven, these are not just words of philosophy, but more of a mandate. I lead up the data management function at Northbridge. We are a Canadian insurance company wholly owned by Fairfax Financial Holdings, and we are serving our customers since more than 100 years.
We are looking at voluminous data going into multiple millions of records and billions of records. We collect that data into our Snowflake ecosystem. We need to ensure we collect and process it in a way and present it in a way that users can benefit from, which has good data quality and accuracy. When we build all these guardrails through Power BI and Snowflake's ecosystem, it starts to generate trust and overall credibility at the end. As we aggregate and collect information, we need to also summarize information. We need to provide that information to our financial departments and also regulatory departments on what's happened through the month. If we are late or if you are submitting data which is not accurate, there are regulatory consequences.
We chose to migrate all of our workloads to Snowflake on Azure. This goes back to our days of 2020 when we were exploring technologies. As IT teams, we were all challenged to satisfy new requirements that were emerging. So when we chose Snowflake to be our initial use case, it was centered around how do we ensure we get the speed? We get the processing power? At the same time, costs are manageable.
So that was a perfect fit for us to choose Snowflake on Azure. That, along with Microsoft's Power BI ecosystem, really found our solution. And then, as they say, rest is history. We've been constantly adding a lot of use cases on same ecosystem and driving benefits. Some people want to just interact with data through chatbots. Some people just want to see it on a report. Some people want to build a report themselves. We have piloted many chatbots with Cortex on Snowflake. Make that experience to a user very easy with conversational experiences on data. And when we start looking at how we make access to data for our business users easy through Power BI and chatbots, that will continue to drive a lot of innovation going forward. I think the future is exciting.
