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Skandia

Agile Data Engine providing a path to improved data quality for Skandia

As a financial and insurance services leader in Sweden that provides pensions, healthcare insurances, consumer loans, and mortgages, Skandia has nearly 2 million customers, of which over 80% are owners of the company through their individual pension funds.

Agile Data Engine providing a path to improved data quality for Skandia

With a history dating back to 1855, Skandia runs and operates a high volume of their business on their own on-premise technology platforms. These pose challenges for data quality and security, which led Skandia to reach out to Solita to help them design and build the foundation of their future cloud data warehouse and data architecture.

Regulatory reporting one of several main drivers behind a future-proof data platform

Skandia was recently looking to set up and implement a new cloud-based data platform that would easily scale with their business needs and help automate their reporting processes.

The main reason for this fundamental shift away from their current on-premise solutions was due to the rigorous compliance procedures that Skandia follows because of regulatory obligations. This creates a need to be able to quickly react to changing requirements when it comes to new laws and other governmental factors.

In the spring of 2020, Skandia partnered with Solita to develop and provide the backbone of their future data architecture and cloud-based data warehouse. In doing so, Skandia would be able to leverage the advantages of the cloud, including dramatically speeding up their development work and improving their data quality and security.

Following an evaluation process, it was decided that Solita’s Agile Data Engine would be the central component in Skandia’s data architecture. Agile Data Engine is Solita’s innovative DataOps platform for cloud-based data warehouses. As Skandia was looking to renew both the technological capabilities and the way of working related to their data development, Agile Data Engine was identified as a solution that would provide benefits for both needs.

With nearly two centuries of business behind them, Skandia is running an extensive data program, and are in the early phases of renewing their entire backend.

Solita’s Agile Data Engine has been implemented as the core of Skandia’s data architecture. This architecture will include a data catalog to which all their metadata is gathered, with the aim to automate their data development and deployment pipelines with everything that goes into data warehouse solution packages.

Benefits of Solita Agile Data Engine

  • More efficient ways of working with faster time-to-value.

  • More frequent feedback cycle with continuous, iterative deployments.

  • Increased value of the data asset and the opportunity to build new services on top of the data.

  • Traceability, improved data quality and full audit trail of all data.

  • Training solutions, materials and courses on Agile Data Engine for Skandia staff.

With Agile Data Engine in place, we have more confidence and trust than ever in our data accuracy, when it comes to our required regulatory reporting.

Carl Schnackenburg Head of Data & Analytics, Skandia

“With Solita’s Agile Data Engine, we’ve provided a platform that allows Skandia to substantially modernise their systems,” says Anssi Tikka, Client Director at Solita. “It’s been the core of the modern platform for them.”

Agile Data Engine is the foundation that supports Skandia in operating more efficiently and at the same time provides improvements for their data quality and traceability. In addition, it is also providing Skandia’s business with more timely data and new opportunities for utilising modern technology, creating new services, and increasing the value of their data asset.

Agile Data Engine means more modern and efficient ways of working

Agile Data Engine offers Skandia more than just the technology itself. It has also improved processes and has helped Skandia’s developers build new competencies. It is a cultural shift, where Solita’s Agile Data Engine drives change that comes with a resilient architecture, allowing for agile ways of working and efficient scalability. True agility is about creating value continuously, in small increments and iterations. With Agile Data Engine, new data content and changes to the data warehouse can be deployed continuously in small pieces. The whole data architecture is built in an evolutionary way, based on shared design rules and metadata-driven automation.

Regulatory reporting a critical benefit of Solita’s Agile Data Engine solution

The first step in applying the Agile Data Engine based solution was to secure an effective way forward for Skandia’s regulatory reporting.

“Key requirements for Skandia’s regulatory reporting are traceability and a full audit trail,” says Anssi Tikka. “In other words, we at Solita are providing Skandia with the ability to fully trace the changes that they’ve done in their new data platform to the data itself.”

The accuracy of data provided is at the very top of the list of requirements for Skandia and with the solutions Solita has put into place, speed and quality of the data remain a key focus.

Solita case Skandia
“ What Solita has delivered for us is a completely unified approach. With the Agile Data Engine platform, we don’t need to connect various tools or implementations for data streams and processes to work together. Solita has connected those dots for us.

Carl Schnackenburg Head of Data & Analytics, Skandia

With Agile Data Engine in place, we have more confidence and trust than ever in our data accuracy, when it comes to our required regulatory reporting,” says Carl Schnackenburg, Head of Data & Analytics at Skandia. “We’re able to showcase this improved data quality to auditors whenever needed, due to the increased traceability. While this is the first of many modernised implementations we are planning, for us at Skandia it’s also critical that Solita is helping us to ensure proper regulatory reporting.”

With the new DataOps paradigm that Agile Data Engine enables, Skandia is seeing clearly how the platform differs from traditional data warehouse automation solutions.

“What Solita has delivered for us is a completely unified approach. With the Agile Data Engine platform, we don’t need to connect various tools or implementations for data streams and processes to work together,” says Carl. “Solita has connected those dots for us.”

With some of Skandia’s mainframe systems dating back decades and legacy data platforms needing to be regularly updated, shifting their data and workloads to a new and modern cloud-based platform will ease some of the burdens.

“We’re not done with the full implementation just yet, but we’re getting there,” says Carl. “And this will take our regulatory reporting to another level, ensuring the process to be more efficient, more secure and more traceable. That traceability is crucial for our regulatory reporting and is something we’ve been aiming for.”

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Want to know more? Contact us

  • Anssi Tikka SVP, Sales and Marketing, Belgium and Germany, Solita

    [email protected] +358 50 4433 789