Two companies form Aegon Santander Portugal, Aegon Santander Portugal Life, a life insurance company Inc. and Aegon Santander Portugal Non-Life, an insurance company Inc., which started the commercial activity in January 2015. The two companies share shareholders, board members, internal structure, and some processes.

The team is young, dynamic, and ruled by four fundamental pillars: Proximity, Transparency, Customer Focus and Excellence.

Over these first six years of activity, the company has achieved the defined objectives, maintaining a strategy that focuses on customers, combined with an offer of innovative products marketed through an adequate distribution model, supported by the multi-channel that allows Aegon Santander Portugal to reach customers flexibly and conveniently.

Over the years, the company has expanded its commercial offer to respond to customer needs. Currently, it markets a wide range of protection products against death and disability risks, with more than half a million customers who trust Aegon Santander to secure what is most precious to them, with a wide range of coverage and complementary services, casualty protection, health and multi-risk housing, which represent approximately 1 million policies.

At Aegon Santander Portugal, data access for the teams was time-consuming and complex because the databases were not structured.

This situation made data access extremely difficult for the teams, who had to consult the source systems directly, aggregating information from external sources. There was also the technical complexity of extracting information directly from the core systems and the additional challenge of ensuring that the various departments’ studies and analyses were based on the same sources of information.

As the business grows, together with the natural increase in the history and granularity of data, the need for a project arises.
In addition, Sílvia Rocha, Responsible for Implementing IFRS17 at AEGON Santander Portugal, details other important reasons that served as a starting point, such as: “the need to have a structured database that compiles all the information from the core systems and all the external sources of our companies, facilitating the work of our employees in accessing a single source of information; and the implementation of the new financial reporting standard (IFRS 17), which requires several calculations executed by different calculation engines, based on a wide and granular universe of data”.

To this end, the Technology and Operations, Financial, Technical and Product, Risk Management and Internal Control departments were involved.
It is also important to highlight that although the implementation of IFRS 17 triggered the urgency of this DataLake construction project, Aegon’s goal is to develop Analytics layers that allow all employees quick, easy and agile access to data. This situation will significantly facilitate the day-to-day lives of employees who are already very excited and expectant about these significant improvements.

Although the project is still in progress, the company anticipates that “it will bring countless benefits to our companies, namely in the optimization and simplification of data consultation processes and in our future monthly account closing process under IFRS 17”.

In addition to greater agility in accessing data, this means simpler, faster and more flexible processes.

In the future, Aegon Santander Portugal intends to implement an Analytics solution on DataLake, which allows a more accessible and dynamic data consultation, extendable to all employees.

With this implementation, the analyses developed by the different Departments will be carried out more agilely. “The basic principle on which we started the project is that all studies carried out in the company, namely, analysis of pricing and economic viability of products, financial analysis, studies to support strategic Marketing decisions, analysis of management indicators, among others, start to be implemented based on this solution”, explains Sílvia Rocha.