Global Insurance Brokerage Firm Gains Visibility of Worldwide Customer Accounts and Uncovers Growth Opportunities

Dun & Bradstreet has a long-term client relationship with a firm in the global insurance industry. According to its U.S.-based master data and data stewardship leader, who’s worked for the firm for more than 27 years, “D&B has been with the company longer than I have.”

Over the course of that relationship, D&B has been essential to the client’s efforts to use data to better understand its relationships with its customers. As the starting point for that deeper understanding, the client historically sought to link new accounts to a Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S® Number in its transactional systems. This nine-digit unique identifier helps unlock an accurate, up-to-date view of a company’s operating status, corporate family tree, and other details.

“In our systems, everything starts with creating an account,” said the client’s master data leader. “But the core capability to connect those accounts to a D-U-N-S Number wasn’t always consistent across the countries and regions we do business in.”

There was consistency, though, in the regular updates of account data D&B provided to the client. “This was our contracted process — we’d send over the records we were interested in, and D&B would tell us which records had been refreshed, and why,” said the master data leader. “This was a manual process that had continued unchanged for quite a few years.”  

The client operates in a very competitive industry where much of its growth has taken place through acquisitions. As it has grown, it has worked steadily to improve the efficiency of its systems, processes, and data where those improvements would add value to the business. 

Within these efforts, enhancing enterprise analytics has been a focus area because of the key role it plays in helping the firm’s leaders make better decisions and achieve goals. And as the master data leader had known for some time, instituting master data management (MDM) would accelerate their organization’s analytical expertise and create better business intelligence that could reveal new growth opportunities, among other benefits. 

MDM Prioritization, D&B Connect, and Data Blocks

A recent CRM initiative prompted a reexamination of customer data and recognition of the need for some major changes to help the client get more and better information about its customers, get it much more quickly, and do more with it (e.g., data modeling). The client turned to D&B, its longtime data provider, to help modernize its ability to leverage D&B’s data as well as its own core data management processes. 

“We now have D&B Connect, a self-service platform that allows our data team to do its own lookups,” he said. “So we don’t need to continue that periodic data refresh process anymore — the team has been trained to do it themselves.”

The firm also started using D&B’s Data Blocks — groupings of logical, topic-based data from the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud that can be easily ingested into an MDM platform. With D&B’s APIs, Data Blocks provided the foundation for a quick, out-of-the-box integration of Reltio, a cloud-native MDM platform that is a D&B strategic partner. Reltio and Data Blocks are enabling the firm’s data team to perform bulk matches of customer data and enrich it with data attributes that sharpen the view of specific entities and their corporate hierarchies. 

Achieving the Global View of Top Customer Accounts

D&B’s client now has much better capabilities for lifecycle management of its top revenue-generating customers and the business being done with those companies. 

“Our firm has made significant investments in client enablement, but that’s not easy to deliver if you can’t tie all the data related to the business with that client across multiple systems globally,” said the master data leader. “It wasn’t difficult to produce a country-specific view. But we found it challenging to generate a regional or global view of the business defined and transacted in many different local systems worldwide. We were missing the ability to create the full picture of our multilevel relationships with our trading partners. 

“We’re a large global company doing business with other large global companies,” he continued. “There can be many points of connection with our customers locally or regionally. And within the ecosystems of those trading partners, there could be many opportunities for us to support them as they experience changes in their businesses. That’s why a 360-degree view of those customers is such a powerful thing. It helps you do a better job trying to grow the business as well as manage risks that may arise in your customer relationships.” 

The master data leader also feels confident that if a member of his C-suite asks for a view of the business his firm is doing with another company, that information can now be provided in a fraction of the time it used to take.

“In the past, this would have been a very reactive, time-consuming, costly process. And it would have been ‘point-in-time’ work, used for a single purpose and then discarded. Now we have the information essentially at our fingertips, and we can retain it and refresh it and get longer-term value from it.

“Because of D&B and our MDM program, we’re seeing our client data making a broader impact across the firm,” he said. “Mastering data proactively across our many transactional systems has allowed us to multiply the value being generated from that data. It’s helping us with revenue reporting, and it’s also helping us establish a more comfortable ‘balance of trade’ with enterprise clients that might also be in our supplier portfolio.” 

Looking Ahead: Next Phases of the MDM Journey

At this writing, the firm is still in the early days of what is planned as a multi-phase MDM program. The first phase focused on mastering the data for a smaller group of top revenue-generating customers; with this accomplished, the next phase will expand to encompass a much wider segment of the firm’s clients. 

“With a more thorough understanding of our relationships with other businesses, and with better confidence in our enterprise views, we can better leverage the data we collect, and the data D&B provides, to manage those relationships more strategically,” said the master data leader. “And we can accomplish this faster, with better accuracy, and with fewer resources.

“We’ll keep working with D&B to build on the progress we’ve made and expand into areas like ongoing monitoring of our customer data,” he said. “We’ll continue transforming our customer experience with our MDM platform, better data quality, and some solid governance. There’s still a lot to do, but I don’t think I would have spent so much time on MDM without knowing that D&B could get us where we wanted to be with the data, tools, and data management capabilities we needed.”