Zurich Insurance takes AIM at 'Data-as-a-Service'

Zurich Insurance is trying out a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) model, in conjunction with AIM Software, to be able to direct its energies toward high-level analytics and artificial intelligence, the insurer’s Ruchir Verma said.

“We want to get into predictive analytics. Currently, we do reporting, but that is just the basics. Reporting solves accounting problems; it’s mostly the hindsight that we get out of it. We want to get much more advanced in this area,” said Verma, who is head of global services in the investment management business at Zurich.

Verma, who was speaking at the North American Financial Information Summit on May 21 in New York, hopes that the partnership with AIM Software will allow Zurich to reallocate resources from operations and change management to better experiment with advanced techniques like AI. He would also like to see a refocusing on the firm’s core systems after years of throwing money at regulatory needs.  

“Our resources are currently doing what AIM and third parties could do as part of DaaS. We would like to take [our] resources and focus them on areas where we think we have a competitive advantage, where we can bring in better results for the company, where we can be separate from our competitors. Competitive advantage starts when we put data in our core systems,” he said.

Verma’s part of the business invests a centralized pool of assets. Within that business is a unit called investment administration and accounting that has oversight over most of the investment accounting across the group and looks after all the back-office functions. The firm’s data management, therefore, is within Verma’s remit.

“All of the reference and pricing data that we use actually falls to my team. I have people sitting there and working on this data, making it useful, putting into downstream systems for accounting, reporting, risk systems—things like that,” he said.

Zurich has been using AIM Software’s GAIN product for these tasks for some years now. Currently, however, it’s in the early stages of working with the provider to move all of the data from the investment management part of the business to their cloud environment.

Gayatri Raman, AIM’s CEO, said her company started with Zurich’s data operations, and is progressing from there.

“That is the natural entry point for a lot of our customers,” she said. “But the way we are setting up the services is that we have data operations and data advisory kicking off in parallel. Once we take hold of the operations, people are going to come back and say, ‘Well I need a data feed,’ or, ‘There is a new regulation coming, what are you going to do about it?’. So we think advisory will have the most impact.”

Verma said the two companies are working together to get the service running within the next few months.