Developing Data Pipelines Has Been a Big Focus for Us

Implementing a data strategy in a rapidly evolving environment is a difficult task. But those difficulties pile up with the scale and history of an organization. Canadian financial services company Sun Life has been in business for over 115 years. David Atkinson, Vice President of Data and Analytics at Sun Life, speaks with Christopher Bergh, CEO, Data Kitchen, about data quality issues and the need for setting up an integrated data analytics ecosystem within the organization.

Atkinson is in charge of data analytics at Sun Life. He has been with the organization for about 11 years and has been in the financial services industry for a little over two decades. 

He says that the biggest opportunity is to better leverage the data the organization already has to help its clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. He mentions that life, health, and wealth products create long-standing relationships and so, Sun Life’s knowledge about its clients is robust.

“We're now starting to leverage that knowledge, to understand our client's needs better. So, we're able to give them the personalized services, experience, and relevant information they need to achieve their goals,” Atkinson says.

He cites the example of Ella, Sun Life’s online digital assistant in Canada, that has engaged with clients 3.7 million times this year. Ella recommends a variety of products and benefits, such as topping up retirement savings or taking better advantage of the client’s existing benefits.

In his view, one of the areas Sun Life is uniquely positioned in is helping clients navigate a complex health care system. It does so by engaging clients early on and helping them identify options, connecting them with resources, and helping them find the right experts and treatments. This, in turn, can lead to better health outcomes, which is good for clients, the plan sponsors, the health care system, and it’s also better from a data and analytics perspective.

Regarding strategy, Atkinson explains that Sun Life is focusing on four key themes:

• Making trusted data easier to find and use securely.

• Building an integrated data and analytics ecosystem that supports various types of data consumers, such as financial analysts, marketing specialists, data scientists, management teams, or executives.

• Maintaining strong data security, access controls, data privacy, and protection. 

• Automating as many functions and routines as possible to speed up the cycle time from idea to production, by offering consumers more self-serve capabilities.

According to Atkinson, while advanced analytics capabilities are evolving rapidly and are a huge opportunity, it is also difficult to keep pace. Sun Life has been building a modern cloud-based data and analytics ecosystem on AWS. This helps create more flexibility by making it easier to integrate new capabilities, allowing the organization to take advantage of the rapidly evolving native capabilities on AWS.

Atkinson explains his approach to addressing challenges with data errors in production. He says that privacy and data security have been a part of the organization’s data and cloud transition from the start. Based on its strong foundation with the right controls and privacy in place, Sun Life is able to develop new capabilities to meet the requirements around quality, protection, privacy, and ethical use of data.

Sun Life has multiple financial products with various business units and systems, and the data is good, Atkinson states. However, the challenge — as with most large organizations — is that a lot of the data sources are coupled with applications or agents and these applications are tied with business units, which creates traditional data silos.

Nevertheless, he maintains, there's significant value in unlocking the silos by bringing data together for analytics or operational and marketing purposes.  

“Over the last four years, we've been making great progress in integrating data from across the organization and driving new insights,” Atkinson says. “Developing reasonable data pipelines has been a big focus for us because, if we look historically at a typical data-centric project, about 40% of the project time was actually spent finding, cleaning, and connecting the data; it is a massive expense. But what’s even worse is that, when the next project came along, the data was largely not reusable by the next project team,” he explains.

Atkinson concludes that the important focus area for Sun Life has been the ability to reduce cycle time by bringing capabilities to market faster.

David Atkinson is the Vice President of Data and Analytics at Sun Life, a leading financial services company that helps clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. He is an experienced senior business and IT executive with over 20 years in the financial services industry and 11 years with Sun Life. Prior to joining Sun Life, Atkinson was in IT Plan Operations at the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan and IT Business Performance Management at TD Bank Financial Group. Atkinson has a broad experience in strategic planning, program leadership, consensus building and execution of major strategic initiatives. He is skilled in application development, data and analytics, infrastructure, and cloud vendor management.