Reale Group boosts its data infrastructure with Azure AI

The reference insurance company in the Spanish market is applying Machine Learning models that allow them to improve their business processes and data usage efficiency, having a positive impact on their customers.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution continues to impact companies across industries, optimizing processes and showing the benefits of a digital transformation based on the power of the cloud to achieve results more efficiently. The insurance industry is no stranger to this change, and an example of this is Reale Group, a company that has already begun to harness the full potential of the cloud to extract greater intelligence from its data and make available to their customers more personalized solutions tailored to their needs.

 Reale Group figures give you an idea of the huge amount of data the company handles. With a presence in Spain, Italy and Chile and more than 3,100 employees, it is made up of thirteen companies in the insurance, banking, finance, real estate and services sector, with more than 3.8 million customers.

With this context, the company was challenged to build a new group-wide data architecture, which would lead to a more efficient, scalable and collaborative analytics platform. With good experience in previous projects with ENCAMINA, Reale Group’s Technical and Business Intelligence areas started to work on the Azure Databricks solution to launch the project.

Facilitating the day-to-day lives of data engineers

Reale Group’s goal was that both its actuaries and data engineers, professionals in charge of quantifying and analyzing risks – based on mathematical models – would be able to incorporate automatic learning models into business processes and group applications in a shorter time. In fact, thanks to Azure, they have achieved a time reduction of approximately 60% in machine Learning algorithm training processes. «Azure Databricks proved to be the optimal choice for our need to provide our actuaries with advanced tools to work with complex models» says Nuria Ribagorda, Director of the Actuarial Department of Reale Seguros, «By having to build such complex analysis databases, teams with more basic calculation programs were becoming less effective in doing their job.»

Through integration with open source libraries, Azure Databricks enables you to launch clusters that are installed, configured, and tuned to ensure reliability and performance without monitoring. In this way, customers can develop interactive workspaces that support different types of tools and the most popular languages in data engineering, providing machine learning with great potential from big data, natively integrated with Azure.

In this way, Reale Group has been able to respond to the main challenges and difficulties that data scientists encounter, such as infrastructure management, the power to manage large databases, and a correct visualization of information to be able to create an AI model based on algorithms.

 As Nilley Gómez, Reale Group’s Enterprise Data Architect explains: «Azure Databricks is an extension of computational capacity that makes it easier for our actuaries to be more agile in doing their work, being able to develop more efficient models in less time, and allowing more tests.»

 The benefits of the Microsoft cloud solution chosen by Reale Group go much further, also providing cost savings. «By having a payment model based on use, we have been able to better optimize resources. This is very important when deploying a memory-intensive cluster. Auto-shutdown configuration means that our actuaries do not rely on IT teams deploying virtual machines to run models,» Adds Nilley.

Collaboration and security united

The insurance company has managed to build with Microsoft’s cloud, a collaborative machine learning model, one of the main focuses for Reale Group. With a collaborative and flexible environment, they have improved the way scientists, architects and data engineers work together, saving days of work in the process of developing and implementing algorithms.

Finally, it should be noted that this entire platform has all the security measures that only Azure is able to offer to enterprises, through Active Directory. Thanks to Active Directory, Reale Group is always complying with group regulations and restrictions, ensuring data security at all levels.

Looking ahead, Reale Group will continue to look for solutions that connect even more with its customers, creating new products and business models through Event Management, Real-Time and Streaming, that continue to make the most of the cloud’s potential, and applying intelligence to deliver services that fit people.