Data-Driven Innovation in Insurance: A Case Study of Assurance IQ and Looker

Assurance IQ is a direct-to-consumer platform that transforms the buying experience for individuals seeking personalized health and financial wellness solutions. Since 2016, Assurance IQ has been protecting and improving the personal and financial health of millions of consumers by offering insurance solutions and access to third-party providers to help them meet their needs. The company offers life, health, Medicare, and property and casualty insurance and mortgage products tailored to the needs of their consumers. Assurance IQ's approach is innovative and data-driven, using a combination of advanced data science and a human touch to offer solutions. The company was acquired by Prudential Financial in 2019, adding this innovative direct-to-consumer channel to its portfolio to reach an underserved mass market.

Assurance IQ, a direct-to-consumer platform offering personalized health and financial wellness solutions, faced a significant challenge in its early days. The company's data team was small and struggled with a scattered internal view of the business due to disconnected reports in siloed tools. They were using Excel, SQL, and other in-house tools, but lacked a true business intelligence (BI) platform. This resulted in inefficient use of time and a lack of a complete real-time view of the business for decision-making. Leadership lacked critical insight, and there were constant challenges around trust and consistency of the data. The data team wanted to ensure that each team member was looking at the same clean, accurate data and wanted to empower employees to explore the data on their own. However, the visualization tool they were using lacked version control and standardization.

To address these challenges, Assurance IQ's data team decided to build a BI platform to promote trust in the data and provide self-service across the organization. They chose Looker as their BI platform due to positive past experiences. Looker's semantic modeling layer, LookML, provided the data governance they needed to scale self-service data access as the business grew rapidly. Looker’s version control also allowed the team to engineer critical data reporting quickly and accurately, saving them hours of repeated code writing so they could focus on higher-value projects. Assurance IQ used Looker to create a unified view of the entire marketing funnel, analyzing upstream and downstream data sources. This enabled the marketing team to confidently build their own reports to help power decision-making and increase the impact of their programs. The data team also used Looker to create a dashboard for sales managers, enabling them to access performance reports on their own and take action directly from the dashboard.

• The implementation of Looker has resulted in significant operational benefits for Assurance IQ. The company has been able to create a data culture that is ahead of the industry. The use of Looker has enabled the company to break data out of silos and make it accessible, creating a single source of truth for the business. This has improved efficiency for the data team and has given senior leaders the ability to spend their time efficiently on the most important things. The use of Looker has also enabled the company to make real-time marketing decisions, increasing the impact of their programs. Sales managers have been empowered to access performance reports on their own and take action directly from the dashboard, improving operational execution. Furthermore, the use of Looker has opened up new opportunities for Assurance IQ to increase the value they deliver to their external partners.

• Scales access to trustworthy data as the company grows—without needing to add an analyst headcount

• Reduces the load on data science team by creating a safe space for business users to explore and do their own data discovery

• Increases marketing ROI by helping marketers access critical marketing data to identify and reduce spend on low-value activities