SpareBank 1 Forsikring is part of the SpareBank 1 Alliance (the second largest financial group in Norway). It is the third largest supplier of pension products in Norway. It was originally a life and non-life insurance company but was re-established in 2019 as a pension-only company. The banks in the alliance distribute SpareBank 1 Group’s products and collaborate in key areas such as brands, work processes, expertise development, IT operations, and system development.
Implementing the Information Platform of Pension (IPP)
Increasing regulations in the financial services industry increased the reporting obligations to various internal and external stakeholders at SpareBank 1 Forsikring. Regulations to help detect and report suspicious activities related to money laundering and terrorist financings, such as securities fraud and market manipulation, became top priorities at SpareBank 1 Forsikring. The bank needed a new data platform that could:
- Efficiently integrate data from all kinds of heterogeneous data sources
- Deliver the data to consuming applications, regardless of their vendor origin
- Provide the flexibility to add new data sources as quickly as needed
- Support a variety of different input/output formats and tools
- Shorten time-to-delivery of data integration projects
- Support modern data and analytics use cases, and
- Ensure that the data infrastructure is secure, well-governed, and intuitive enough to promote a self-service data-sharing culture within the organization
The new data platform at Sparebank1, which meets the above criteria, is called the Information Platform of Pension (IPP), and it relies on the Denodo Platform’s data virtualization capabilities. The IPP integrates data from all kinds of external and internal source systems and makes the data available for reporting and analytical purposes to tools like Tableau and Power BI. Currently, the Denodo Platform serves the data requirements of SpareBank 1, along with the traditional ETL-based data warehouse built on SQL-Server. SpareBank 1 is also using the Denodo Platform catalog to make it easier for its users to access the relevant data for themselves without having to send requests to the data integration teams.