Arch Reinsurance

Project Overview

The Facultative or Individual Risk division of Arch Reinsurance engaged Project Balance to reengineer their data reporting system and develop a data warehouse and data visualization, analytics and reporting dashboard. Operations staff and underwriters were spending hours and in some cases days, extracting data, preparing report and cross-checking results. As the division matured, their data analysis needs also grew.

Solution

Project Balance conducted a requirements gathering workshop to understand and document Arch’s business needs, source data, data flow, business rules and display output for automating the identified critical reports. We wrote functional and technical specifications prior to the development of the data warehouse, designing a simplified and maintainable data warehouse extracting data from 5 source system. Over a period of several years additional source data have been added to the data warehouse.

Project Balance’s analysts have expertise in testing ETL and reports data. Data relationships can be very complex and small changes in one element can have significant negative effects on calculations. Using SQL queries and data comparison tools, we carefully test database transaction and reports. Project Balance also developed a series of reports for underwriters and operations staff in Power BI. Casualty and property facultative reports include IR and program premium reports, submissions, renewals, peril, occupancy and retro.

Technology

• .Net/C#
• MS SQL Database
• Azure cloud
• Power BI

Specialization

Project Balance also developed a .Net/C# management application that allows users to manage data exceptions, manage the accounting data process that interoperates with their accounting system, produce standard reports, and view the audit trail. We worked closely with the client to identify more than 145 data exceptions that are routinely monitored and addressed for improved data quality in the .Net management app. The management app also provides a filter-enabled data export for reporting catastrophe aggregates.

Impact

Operations managers and underwriters have access to clean, well-organized and refreshed data on a daily basis. These reports not only save hours or days of time, they have allowed the Arch Re staff explore the data and determine how best to optimize their time to bring in more business at appropriate risk levels.

Testimonial

“Project Balance was instrumental in helping Arch Re Fac transform our data into insight and insight into action. They led interactive requirements workshops and worked closely with our subject matter experts to design and develop a data warehouse with Power BI analytics. We went from spending days and weeks preparing reports, to seconds. Project Balance made sense of our data and created visualizations used at all levels of the organization – from the executive level to assistant underwriters. They put us on the path of turning our data into an asset, leveraged everyday by our underwriters for making informed business decisions.”

Ken Vivian | Chief Executive Officer, Arch Re North America