UAF Life Patrimoine transforms its data access with Qlik

“Innovation in life insurance”

Part of the Crédit Agricole Assurances Group, UAF LIFE Patrimoine is a distribution platform specializing in savings, retirement and wealth management products. It designs its products, handles their administration and runs a network of independent partners to drive sales of its offering.

UAF LIFE Patrimoine’s DNA rests on three pillars: expertise, proximity and agility. Agility, because the company’s ambition is to anticipate major trends, analyze them and seize market opportunities.

With this in mind, UAF LIFE Patrimoine decided to rebuild its reporting platform, which had become obsolete, on a new technology with a new data model.

The goal: more flexibility and better scalability. For this project, the company put its trust in Qlik Sense and Synolia. Here is a look back at an ambitious, highly “data-driven” project.

The challenge

UAF LIFE Patrimoine works with a multitude of providers that send it data on their contracts every day through “data feeds.”

To run acceptance testing and reporting, UAF LIFE Patrimoine needs to use all of this data, without exception. Until then, since the company had no specialized tool, its teams extracted tables and analyzed them in an Excel spreadsheet, all by hand.

The problem: on top of being especially time-consuming and cumbersome, this method did not allow for exhaustive data analysis. “With very large files, sometimes up to 3 million rows, we were hitting the limits of Excel,” says Nicolas Crouzet, Business Project Manager. This made it clear that UAF LIFE Patrimoine needed a specialized solution.

The requirements

The company identified several needs that the chosen solution absolutely had to meet.

First, the teams wanted to be able to query all the data “on demand,” which means giving users a great deal of flexibility and autonomy to freely access the data they want, when they need it.

At the same time, the solution had to be able to rewrite the sales reports generated from an application.

Choosing the ideal solution

At the start of the project, the group was already familiar with QlikView but still explored its options with Synolia. Synolia quickly steered the teams toward Qlik Sense, a solution that better met their stated needs.

It is the self-service nature of Qlik Sense, its “on demand” side, that made it a better fit. “We decided to follow Synolia’s recommendations and go with Qlik Sense rather than QlikView,” says Nicolas Crouzet.

Exhaustive testing for optimal security

Rebuilding a database can have many side effects, which can prove highly problematic. For this reason, UAF LIFE Patrimoine ran very broad acceptance testing phases on the new data warehouse.

The teams had to test everything to verify that all developments were correct and that the data as a whole was consistent.

Day to day, the teams use Qlik Sense to extract a wide range of information. Sales reports, inflows by provider, breakdown by investment vehicle, data by provider or by customer, best-selling funds and products: the possibilities for analysis are endless!

The solution makes it possible to combine all kinds of data, in any volume, in a single view. Another plus: users welcomed Qlik Sense and adopted it readily.

Taking stock: what are the benefits?

Qlik Sense makes the teams more productive by letting them freely search and explore the data, instantly steering the analysis according to each user’s ideas and needs. “A process that could take 30 minutes now takes just 5, or 10 at most!” says Nicolas Crouzet.

Beyond offering endless room for improvement in data processing and reporting, the solution also removes every technical roadblock, allowing UAF LIFE Patrimoine to broaden what it can do.

“Today, in just a few minutes, we can run complex processing. In that sense, the added value of Qlik Sense is huge.”

Real decision support

With Qlik Sense, the teams make better-informed decisions. The solution offers a factual, accurate view of reality that eliminates, or at least reduces, uncertainty. In just a few clicks, it is possible to confirm (or rule out) a given trend. “The data speaks for itself!” says Nicolas Crouzet.

A sales asset

Analyzing consolidated data allows the sales and operations teams to deepen their customer relationships. “Qlik Sense is a real source of indicators for deciding on our developments and our sales strategy,” adds Nicolas Crouzet.

What’s next?

Nicolas Crouzet wants to build his teams’ Qlik skills so they can take data analysis even further.