COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — September 21, 2021 — 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 democratize 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 Umeshi de Fonseka, Chief Technology Officer, AIA Sri Lanka.
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 organizational 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 Gaurika Wijeratne, Vice President for Data & AI, Fortude. “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 conceptualized, 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 Gogula Aryalingam, Lead Architect for Data & AI, Fortude.
“The Power BI dashboards facilitate fact-based decision making. It helps our teams to focus more on analyzing and understanding Management Information, rather than preparing it,” said Gavin D’Rosairo, Chief Financial Officer, AIA Sri Lanka. “Our teams now have access to visualized and analyzed 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 utilize 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.
About AIA
AIA Group Limited and its subsidiaries (collectively “AIA” or the “Group”) comprise the largest independent publicly listed pan-Asian life insurance group. It has a presence in 18 markets in Asia-Pacific – wholly-owned branches and subsidiaries in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR (1), Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan (China), Vietnam, Brunei, Macau SAR (2), New Zealand, a 99 per cent subsidiary in Sri Lanka, and a 49 per cent joint venture in India.
The business that is now AIA was first established in Shanghai more than a century ago in 1919. It is a market leader in the Asia-Pacific region (ex-Japan) based on life insurance premiums and holds leading positions across the majority of its markets.
AIA meets the long-term savings and protection needs of individuals by offering a range of products and services including life insurance, accident and health insurance and savings plans. The Group also provides employee benefits, credit life and pension services to corporate clients. Through an extensive network of agents, partners and employees across Asia-Pacific, AIA serves the holders of more than 36 million individual policies and over 16 million participating members of group insurance schemes.
AIA Group Limited is listed on the Main Board of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited under the stock code “1299” with American Depositary Receipts (Level 1) traded on the over-the-counter market (ticker symbol: “AAGIY”).
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About Fortude
Fortude is a Microsoft Gold Data Analytics and Gold Data Platform Partner, a Power BI Solutions Partner, and an Infor Global Alliance Partner, delivering world class solutions to customers worldwide.
Our consulting teams’ expert knowledge in Fashion, Food & Beverage, Manufacturing and Distribution coupled with our unique delivery framework, enables customers to implement their Infor software successfully and benefit from continuous optimization and support, as their businesses grow.
Our certified resources are based out of our offices in the US, UK, Australia, Sri Lanka and India, and have experience in implementing projects across many countries including USA, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, South East Asia and South Asia.
At Fortude, our value proposition is to ‘Deliver Solutions That Matter’.
