Challenge
Ageas, one of the worlds largest insurance companies processes an enormous number of daily requests of insurance quotes
as well as approvals for underwriting. Sometimes exceeding 5000 requests per second, each one of these requests needs to
be screened by increasingly sophisticated algorithms to ensure their validity as well as detect potential cases of insurance
fraud. All of this needs to happen within a couple of seconds, failure to respond to the request for quote within a tight
deadline can result in Ageas losing the business.
Currently this process runs on an on-premises licensed Hadoop cluster from an industry leading partner, however with
license and infrastructure costs rising, algorithms becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the underlying data set growing
exponentially, the cost of running the platform was starting to become prohibitive while quote performance was also
decreasing.
As a result of these factors, Ageas set themselves a tight 3-6 month time window to not only perform a PoC of a new solution
with their strategic cloud vendor, Microsoft but also take this new solution to production and demise the legacy on premises
cluster.
Solution
Colibri Digital were engaged to provide strategic insight, architectural and development support for the new platform. We
conducted a number of workshops with key stakeholders, including business teams, IT leadership, and third party security
consultants. Having agreed on an approved technology set with internal security teams, we led the way with the design and
development of a cutting edge new solution making use of the very latest cloud native big data tools available on Azure.
Loosely resembling the well known Kappa architecture, we were able to combine tools like Azure Event Hubs, Azure
Databricks, Azure Data Lake Storage, Functions and CosmosDB with a more traditional ETL orchestration layer – Azure Data
Factory, to provide a solution that met the requirements of both the business, and IT teams.
Colibri Digital then worked side by side with Ageas’s Engineering and Business Intelligence teams to build out both an initial
proof of concept of this solution, as well as a production ready implementation.
Results
In just 3 months, Colibri Digital designed and delivered a proven cloud native big data platform on Azure, meeting all
requirements of business teams and IT leadership as well as both internal and external security teams. This allowed Ageas to
accelerate their original timescale for decommissioning the legacy on premises solution resulting in tens of thousands of
pounds in operational cost savings.
