Use case: “Real Time Bancassurance data exchange program”- To incorporate ACORD standard to exchange policy, commission & premium related information with its partner broker bank and Insurance firm, in near real-time via XML SOAP messages and roll out similar data exchange program across different operating countries using a sustainable solution that could be deployed over any environment with ease.
Goal Statement: To implement an industry-standard, robust, scalable, automated and near real-time data exchange solution for commission reconcile and payouts.
Challenge: The sales process required the insurance company to periodically exchange insurance related data with its partner bank. This data was captured as and when there was a change in insurance related information pertaining to a customer in source systems (AS400). The commission was then triggered on basis of this change and aggregated commission report was created manually by finance team. This information was exchanged primarily through emails without adhering to any industry recognized standard or code resulting in poor information exposure to its partner bank. Due to a complex technical design, high human intervention and low data quality, commission payouts to Bank’s agent took longer reconciling and processing time. Also, there was a lack of platform for Bank to market Insurance products to its customers due to no visibility on data, resulting in loss of business for both Insurance and Bank.
Solution: The proposed technology stack to host and prepare the data integration platform comprised of Pentaho Data Integration and EDB Postgres Edition for data integration, transformation and XML generation.
Pentaho was used for data provisioning from the source systems, for data enrichment, transformation and loading into RDBMS. For generation of complex XML structure along with the high volume of data to be processed, exploiting the XML functionalities of EDB Postgres was the most performance optimized solution. Transformations were created in Pentaho to capture data change and cater commission calculation automation. Further the data was enriched & transformed to align to the desired XML data structure. Pentaho & EDB Postgres were used judiciously to provide a perfect solution for the business use case. We used the XML features & functions available in EDB Postgres to generate the ACORD standard XML content. Finally, Pentaho was used to post the XML data to the REST API end point to be consumed by the applications, on the partner bank side enabling them with exposure to insurance product offerings to their customers and automated commission payouts to their agents.
Business Benefits: The Client is now able to send near real time data to its partner Bank with the help of Pentaho capabilities. The Postgres and Pentaho technologies have leveraged the low cost and high performance balance. The client is capable to scale up its operations for various regions in near future using proposed solution.
Monika Agrawal I Solution Consultant, Ashnik

Monika is a Solution Consultant with Ashnik. She is an experienced professional in data mining methodology and integration tools with more than7 years of experience in Business Intelligence, Integration Services and Database Engineering. Having worked for some of the global companies, she has been instrumental in leading and executing multiple projects and POCs in the capacity of product consultation, analytics and solution designing for gaming, media, FMCG, and chemicals, payment, and logistics industries.