Anthony Seraphim

Vice President of Data Governance, Texas Mutual Insurance Company

Supernova Award Category: 

Digital Safety, Governance, and Privacy

The Organization: 

As the leader of the workers' compensation market, Texas Mutual Insurance Company (TXM) is committed to building a stronger, safer Texas. The organization was created in 1991 to offer a stable, competitive source of workers' compensation. The company’s mono-line focus has allowed them to excel in the industry. It exists to protect businesses, promote safe environments and help ensure Texas workers get home safely to their families.

72,000+ policyholders trust TXM to care for their 1.5 million workers. The organization takes this responsibility very seriously and has a relentless dedication to provide the type of coverage and services that honors their trust. TXM’s goal is to provide a seamless, best-in-class experience for employers and their workforces.

The Problem: 

Before partnering with Alation and Snowflake, Texas Mutual’s biggest challenge was enabling its organization to leverage data as an asset. Doing so helped Texas Mutual make data-driven decisions to continuously improve claims outcomes and optimize premiums and reserves during a time of rapidly changing factors affecting policyholders. These factors include the opioid crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, an increased volume of complex claims, among others. 

 

To effectively manage their critical use of capital in response to such rapid change, executives rely on a daily premiums report, powered by multiple data sources, complex analysis, and metric calculations to understand the company’s ebbs and flows of cash. But business leaders examining the data had difficulty trusting the accuracy or understanding how information was derived. This created delays, robbing the leadership of their most valuable asset - time, specifically time to make impactful business decisions.

The Solution: 

To tackle these challenges, Texas Mutual has implemented a next generation cloud-based analytics platform and Active Data Governance solution from Snowflake and Alation. Combining data from 11 business domains and key processes such as actuarial, policy management, claims, finance and the like, the solution provides trusted, reliable data that executives rely on to make in-the-moment decisions about how best to deploy capital. The first iteration of Active Data Governance is targeted at premiums with the goal to empower, enable and engage the business across other lines of business.

The Results: 

Working with Alation and Snowflake, Texas Mutual was able to unlock decision-making to improve business performance, mitigate risk and accelerate innovation. Here are some key success examples at Texas Mutual. 

  • Shared Enterprise Premium Definition - For the first time, Texas Mutual has a consolidated view and definition of the premium ‘life-cycle’ including, quotes, written, earned, billed, and net premiums. This allows every business function to report consistently and make decisions using the same, foundational understanding. 
  • Business Critical Executive Decision Support - Executive leaders are able to use daily dashboards and reporting with confidence that the numbers are certified. This is vital in a business where several critical inputs including healthcare trends, demographics, legislation, are changing quickly. This requires quick and accurate responses related to the risk the company is assuming, its capital reserves, and investments. 
  • Modeling Accuracy - Models that show trends and predict the health of the business rely heavily on types of premiums (written, earned, billed, net). Providing self-service access to fully curated and defined premium data helps Actuarial and Finance create models and perform scenario analysis. This impacts changes in pricing, cash management, collections, payments, and other key business processes. 
Metrics: 

As a result of the above improvements, Texas Mutual was able to reduce delivery time of essential business dashboards by 80% thus enabling senior executives to make daily decisions on how best to deploy critical capital. In parallel, the deep trust in the accuracy of the data that the solution engendered largely eliminated the back-and-forth rework and forensic analysis that often resulted from analyzing the underlying assumptions and definitions behind the data.

The Technology: 

The Alation Data Governance for Snowflake solution combines Alation’s market-leading enterprise data catalog platform with the Snowflake Data Cloud, to power leading insurance companies worldwide with a people-first, active governance approach that enables decision makers to trust the data behind each analysis needed to make critical business decisions rapidly.

Disruptive Factor: 

There weren’t necessarily issues or challenges with the implementation of Alation, but there are stigmas around the data governance in general. Now data governance is evolving to include data democratization, but the term data governance evokes a feeling of extreme risk mitigation and risk avoidance. The real challenge was ensuring that our stakeholders understood the value that we were trying to drive and the success indicators for our data governance program. We had to learn to speak the stakeholder’s language and understand their needs. We finally identified that the way to excite them was to articulate the transparency they would have into our data sets. Having visibility into where the data sets came from, and what data we have and don’t have was something that our stakeholders didn’t know data governance could provide. By linking those operational metrics and defining what resonated with our stakeholders we were able to overcome this challenge.

“The combination of Alation’s Active Data Governance, and Snowflake’s Data Cloud is game-changing. It provides a trusted view of our most important business metrics allowing our executives to use data to take immediate and confident action. This results in reduced risk, improved financial health, and greater business agility,” said Anthony Seraphim, Vice President of Data Governance, Texas Mutual Insurance Company.

Shining Moment: 

Alation and Snowflake have a track record of helping global insurers empower their employees to adopt a data culture by breaking down silos, accelerating data governance, and empowering data governance leaders, chief data officers and business executives to make better and more timely decisions with data. These firms leverage the benefit of this combined data governance approach, which takes a people-first approach and applies governance at the point of data use.

About Texas Mutual Insurance Company

Texas Mutual Insurance Company is the state’s leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance. Over 40% of the Texas market, and more than 72,000 Texas businesses rely on us to keep their 1.5 million plus employees safe and on the job. Since 1991, the company has provided a stable, competitively priced source of workers’ comp insurance for Texas employers.