Challenge
The company’s main challenge was to share and process insurance customer data from its European branches and customers in a way that complied with strict data protection regulations. Traditional data protection methods like encryption and data masking did not meet their needs. Encryption left data vulnerable when it was decrypted for processing, and data masking solutions degraded the quality and granularity, making the data less useful for analytics.
Moreover, the company had to manage long and complex approval processes for insurance data processing and sharing, which significantly slowed down their analytics projects and increased the time to insight. The threat of potential data breaches, ransomware attacks, and enforcement actions posed a significant risk.
Solution
The company implemented Anonos’ data protection software,
Data Embassy, to overcome these challenges. Data Embassy provided the insurer with technical privacy controls that not only protected data at rest and in transit but also while it was being processed, thus mitigating the risk of data breaches.
The utilized technology was statutory pseudonymization, a combination of de-identification methods, and dynamically changing codes to replace direct and indirect identifiers in the original data. Unlike data masking, which simply deletes sensitive information, statutory pseudonymization allows for authorized re-identification using the associated keys.
This approach ensured that sensitive insurance customer data remained protected while still allowing for critical insights to be derived. The associated keys allowed for authorized re-identification, providing the flexibility needed for different data use cases.
Results
Time to insight was reduced by as much as 40%
By using Data Embassy, the company was able to expedite its insurance data analytics projects, as well as external and internal review processes, leading to a significant reduction of time to insight.
Risk modeling and pricing strategy improved by as much as 20%
With the newfound ability to share and process cross-border data lawfully, the insurer could extend their advanced analytics to their European branches, leading to an improvement in risk modeling and pricing strategy.
$5 million in potential fines saved
The enhanced data protection and privacy controls reduced the risk of data breaches and enforcement actions, saving the company an estimated $5 million in potential fines and reputational damages in the first year alone.
Operations expansion and increase in new policies
The solution also allowed the company to expand its operations in European markets with confidence, contributing to an increase in new policies issued in these markets within the first year after implementation.
