AIA partners with Fortude to adopt Microsoft analytics for intelligent decision-making

AIA Sri lanka Chief Technology Officer Umeshi de Fonseka

AIA Sri lanka Chief Financial Officer Gavin D'Rosairo

Data and AI Fortude Vice President Gaurika Wijeratne

AIA (www.aialife.com.lk), one of the leading Life Insurers in Sri Lanka, is expanding the use of analytics to meet its increasing business needs and demands. To provide deeper insights and higher-quality insurance solutions, Fortude – a global technology solutions provider, developed an analytics platform for AIA to enhance their visibility of performance metrics, improve time-to-insight, and securely democratise analytics company-wide. 

“One of our goals was to reimagine how we deliver customer service, and the need for a strong data analytics technology stack was key to achieving this,” said AIA Sri Lanka Chief Technology Officer Umeshi de Fonseka. 

The analytics platform provides AIA with pipelines that automatically and continuously extract large volumes of data from an assortment of software systems to a cloud data lake. It then calculates complex logic to create analytics and make them available to employees across the company at different levels of the organisational hierarchy. 

Interactive analytical reports and dashboards that plug into the analytics platform deliver enterprise business intelligence to the C-level and middle management daily to make informed decisions. The platform also allows AIA employees to easily create their own analytics dashboards while data scientists can conduct their data analysis in a fraction of time and without any security gaps.

“We have a dedicated, certified data analytics team that focuses on delivering on Microsoft’s data and AI technologies,” said Fortude Data & AI Vice President Gaurika Wijeratne. “The skills we bring in coupled with our customer-focused approach make a difference across our implementations.” 

AIA selected Microsoft technologies to deliver on their objectives of enhancing security, scalability, and ease-of-use. The analytics platform was conceptualised, designed and developed using Microsoft’s Azure Data Services — which includes Azure Data Lake, Databricks, Data Factory, SQL Database, and Analysis Services. The enterprise business intelligence subsystem was designed and developed using Microsoft Power BI.

“Using the Azure cloud, we designed an architecture that evolves with AIA’s growing needs,” said Fortude Data & AI Lead Architect Gogula Aryalingam.

“The Power BI dashboards facilitate fact-based decision making. It helps our teams to focus more on analysing and understanding Management Information, rather than preparing it,” said AIA Sri Lanka Chief Financial Officer Gavin D’Rosairo. “Our teams now have access to visualised and analysed data for over 55 KPIs based on their unique requirements. This approach helped deliver a single figure for each KPI and eliminated issues involving reconciling differences in information generated from multiple sources.”

AIA Sri Lanka will continue to look towards further enhancements, to chart the future for life insurance. The next iteration of the company’s analytics platform will be to upgrade to Azure Synapse Analytics, use machine learning for predictive analysis, and utilise artificial intelligence to provide insights to employees in the field.

“Onboarding Azure data services and Power BI was an important milestone in enhancing our cloud technologies, making us the first subsidiary in AIA Group to roll it out. Fortude has been a valuable partner, bringing industry best practices and technology expertise throughout the entire project,” added Umeshi.