Digital Insurance Agency AP Intego Enhances Service and Revenue by Using Dremio to Gain 360° Customer View

Summary

AP Intego is improving customer service and revenue by using the Dremio data lake engine to integrate customer data from multiple sources into a single 360° customer view.

The Business

AP Intego is a leading digital insurance agency and one of the nation’s fastest-growing insurtech companies whose goal is to simplify the purchase, use and renewal of insurance for small business owners. Through technology integrations, AP Intego offers a full line of property and casualty insurance options to the small business customers of hundreds of tech, payroll and other affinity partners. The company also provides customer service, flexible billing and a self-service, online customer platform to its more than 60,000 customers. Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, AP Intego works with 19 A-rated insurance carriers and is licensed in 50 states.

The Challenge

AP Intego operates in a fast-paced and competitive market where they need to quickly provide clients with information on the best price and best fit insurance options. However, it was impossible for their sales and service reps to get quick access to a full view of a customer’s information to proactively provide service recommendations. This information lived in multiple siloed data sources like Apache Parquet and CSV in their data lake as well as Salesforce data via ETL processes that required extensive labor and time to integrate into AP Intego’s systems.

Before Dremio, AP Intego had to write and maintain ETL pipelines to integrate their various data sources or DevOps-intensive tools. They initially tried implementing an Amazon Redshift data warehouse using Python scripting; however, as a small team juggling a lot of requests, they needed a solution that didn’t require a lot of Python and general data pipeline development. They then tried to load everything into a Redshift data warehouse via Amazon S3, but this became difficult to scale effectively as the number of data sources grew.

The company’s goal was to create a 360-degree customer view by integrating multiple data sources into a single data lake that enabled queries across all of their data. They wanted a solution with consistently fast performance at a reasonable cost, and the ability to integrate data operations and engineering to build new applications and functionality.

The Solution

AP Intego first learned about Dremio at the 2018 Data Council conference in San Francisco and decided to try the Dremio Community Edition (CE).

AP Intego’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) data lake includes S3 data lake storage, Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) cloud file storage and Dremio. They are now able to integrate new data sources with a minimal amount of DevOps integration and gain the benefit of highly performant queries via their Looker BI dashboards

“Dremio is a critical part of our enterprise,” says Matt Knoop, AP Intego’s Director of Data Science and Analytics. “We use it for data exploration and as a back end for part of our internal and external insurance platform.”

AP Intego’s data sources include Redshift, Parquet, CSV files and Salesforce via an ODBC connection. They have connected Dremio to their Looker instance, which enables reporting on a much wider scope of data than they had in their data warehouse. Dremio is deployed as a standalone instance, transformations are run within a Dremio Docker container, and JDBC/ODBC connections have their own bare metal EC2 Dremio instance. They write Parquet directly to Amazon EFS and can immediately query the data in Dremio.

“Dremio allows us to have a solution that supports our business without locking us into a contract,” says Knoop. “We feel confident that we’ve found the right partner for our data lake.”