Big Data Architectures for Modernizing Customer Master Systems in Group Insurance and Retirement Planning

Abstract

The rapid pace of business transformation is leading many organizations to overhaul their information technology systems. Master data management and, specifically, Customer Master Systems are often implicated as core infrastructures that organizations will concentrate on upgrading or replacing. Big Data techniques offer new methods for addressing data quality, data latency, data variety, and data velocity issues that are either a roadblock to modernizing historical systems or that organizations would like to take advantage of in developing next generation customer master systems. In this chapter, we look at the challenges of building customer master systems in the Group Insurance and Retirement Planning sector to show how modern business needs run into pragmatic roadblocks. We focus on the specific use cases for managing customer data in Group Insurance with a view to helping identify and prioritize Big Data capabilities that agencies should consider. Our first section examines the Customer Master use cases related to historical and present-day agency relationships and the business rationale for consolidating and maintaining that information. We then describe how to use customer data context to model these use cases. This framing leads into a discussion of design considerations and a candidate architecture featuring a distributed, de-normalized data lake with Microservices providing output for core operational and analytical use cases. Finally, we provide a development road map for organizations that wish to prototype this architecture. The managing agency use case is particularly prevalent in Group and, to a lesser extent, Retirement customer environments. Managing agencies play a key role in all interactions with customers, whether those interactions are directly with the customer or with plan participants who are constituents of the customer. Master agency relationships impact commissions, receivables and payables, systems access, and oversight of plans that are crucial to customer health.