Icatu modernizes its data architecture with Microsoft Cloud solutions

Icatu is a 30-year-old, 100% Brazilian capital company that offers products so its customers can plan for the future, protect the present, and carry out projects at every stage in life. It is the largest insurer among independent companies, considering its consolidated lines of business in life insurance, pension, capitalization, and investments.

With 38 branches across the country and 8 million active deals, Icatu already had a business intelligence structure, but in 2020, mainly due to the increase in the volume of information and the need to give more autonomy to users, it realized that it needed to raise the level of its solution in order to have a positive impact on partners, brokers, and customers, in addition to internal areas.

Microsoft tools suited for the Icatu system

Fabiana Ravanêda Vercezes, coordinator of the Data Intelligence and Analytics team at Icatu Seguros, states that the purpose was to deliver "self-service" to the business areas (self-service BI), giving more autonomy to users in building the views and reports and a new architecture for big data analytics 100% on the cloud, with support from Microsoft and partner company Informatica.

"We deliver projects that have effectively given more power and autonomy for the business to evolve in driving its processes and results. Product, Marketing, Business Planning, Actuarial and Controller have been our key internal customers. The team operates using the latest market tools, using agile methodologies," says Fabiana. 

Always thinking about value generation, the first use case chosen to initiate this transformation was the Marketing area, analyzing cross-sell and upsell needs – concepts that use a series of techniques to explore customer consumption more efficiently, whether offering a more sophisticated product (upsell) or adding more products to the same sale (cross-sell). 

"This first delivery evolved over the course of a year. We looked at our entire internal landscape and what we had from data sources and Microsoft supported us, analyzed the solution, everything we would need to do from data ingestion and pipeline and support from other consulting partners with follow-up and training," Fabiana says. 

Azure supporting more robust data analytics

Icatu, along with BI modernization, has built a new architecture for big data analytics using cloud services on Microsoft Azure. In addition to a modern enterprise data repository (Data Lake), several components have been adopted that interconnect and ensure rapid generation of views and information for the areas.  

"We offer modern components for data extraction and transformation (ETL/ELT), such as Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics, and "sandbox" capabilities, so our engineers and data scientists can work autonomously and securely, ensuring a balance between agility, security, and data privacy," Fabiana says.

For the internal customer (employees), in addition to productivity indicators or operational gains (sensible reduction of average time in data access), the greater autonomy allows them to free up productive capacity, or save time, for new actions or innovations. For the customer, partners, or brokers, the positive impact is due to greater outreach, autonomy, and agility in decision making. The more data and insights generated from the new platform, the more likely they are to make better decisions or fix business strategies.

"From the moment we gain speed in making information available, it becomes possible to act much faster, focusing on more strategic deliveries with value generation," Fabiana says.

With both approaches (self-service BI and analytics), Fabiana believes that, in addition to delivering important projects for various areas, the company also lays the foundation for being able to evolve its digital transformation strategy, adopting AI and machine learning in building even better processes, services, and products for its customers and always in collaboration and support from Microsoft.

"We were very pleased, Microsoft is a great collaborator, providing all the support and follow-up necessary. We are always served very effectively," Fabiana celebrates.