Nationwide Insurance Case Study

Case Study – Nationwide Insurance

Written by Jake Howitzer

4/13/15

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The Problem face by Nationwide

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company is one of the largest insurance and financial services

companies in the world, with revenues of $23 billion and assets north of $160 billion. With its

multifaceted range of insurance, financial services, and investment products sold through more

than 100 separate companies that, while being under the Nationwide umbrella, are run with a

great deal of autonomy, there was a pronounced need to achieve increased efficiency in all its

day to day operations, thereby reducing duplication of efforts, multiple differing data processing

systems, and data replication.

From a hardware standpoint, it may be worth mentioning that their physical IT assets were being

used inefficiently with duplicated/redundant data and that server load was likely higher than it

needed to be, although the BI solution likely reduced the bottleneck related to this. Acquisitions

only exacerbated this issue, creating additional redundant data to be warehoused or potentially

excluded from retention when it should have been. Further, the "stovepipe" approach rather than

centralizing the data on an intermediate level cost the company a fortune in inefficiencies, and

required multiple individuals and many hours to essentially clean up and massage the data. This

all led to a lack of visibility on an executive level and a lack of drill-down/around capability,

which would have hampered executive decision-making. For Nationwide, an enterprise-wide

data warehouse was the obvious solution.

Integrated Data and its Impact on Business Value

Nationwide contracted with Teradata to utilize enterprise data warehouse technology that would

effectively create one comprehensive source for clean, consistent, and complete data that allows

the many business units to apply proven analytics in the decision-making process, resulting in

increased...