Sun Life, VP Data and Analytics: Our Biggest Potential is to Better Leverage Data

(US and Canada) David Atkinson, VP Data and Analytics, discusses his 20 years in the financial services industry and eleven years with Sun Life with Christopher Bergh, CEO of Data Kitchen. According to him, Sun Life's biggest opportunity is to better leverage the data they already have. Their business is to assist clients in achieving long-term financial security and living healthier lives. Life, health, and wealth products foster long-term relationships, and as a result, they are already in touch with clients organizationally, and they are now putting that knowledge and the experience that they have to use to better understand clients' demands.

As a result, they are able to provide customers with more personalized services, experiences, and information. Sun Life is well-positioned to assist clients in navigating a very complex healthcare system when issues arise. By proactively interacting with customers early enough, Sun Life assists clients with identifying options, connecting them with resources, and locating the appropriate expertise and treatment required. This type of approach might lead to far better outcomes, which is beneficial to our clients.

Sun Life is focusing on four major areas in terms of data and analytics. One is to make it easy to find and use reliable data in a secure manner. The second step is to create an integrated data and analytics ecosystem that caters to various data consumers, such as financial analysts or marketing professionals, data scientists, management teams, or executives. The third area is to maintain strong data security, access restrictions, and data privacy and protection. And the fourth is to automate as many operations and routines as possible to shorten the cycle time from idea to production, essentially taking the IT team's optical path by providing data consumers with more self-service options.

"The rate at which new developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning are coming to market is a big opportunity for us," says Bergh, "but it's also tough to keep the pace and tell our cycle time." Using Amazon Web Services, the company has been building a modern cloud-based data and analytics ecosystem, and while this contributes to greater flexibility, it also makes it easier to quickly integrate new capabilities. It also enables Sun Life to make use of AWS's fast-growing native features.

Bergh sees substantial potential in unlocking these data silos by bringing data together for analytics or operational and marketing purposes, but highlights that within a large organization like Sun Life, it's not an easy task from an IT or business standpoint. However, he highlights that they have made excellent strides in integrating during the last four years and how they have spent a significant amount of effort developing workable data pipelines, thereby dramatically shortening the project's timeline and cycle.