Rimac Caso T Dig
Rimac Caso T Dig
IMD-7-2405
14.11.2022
Professor Amit Joshi and Ivy Buche prepared this case as a basis for class discussion
rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a business situation.
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IMD-7-2405
RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
But did RIMAC have the data, algorithms, processes and tools to support this change?
Since 2018, Fernando had been driving RIMAC’s digital transformation, modernizing its
IT infrastructure and support applications across critical business units (BUs). The
objective was to deliver a superior customer experience through faster response times,
enhanced security and improved business continuity and resilience. Fernando believed
that the company was at the point where it had enough data and analytics capabilities
to start scaling up its transformation to deliver on its well-being strategy. Fernando
stated:
In mid-2022, Fernando was preparing for a meeting with his management team. He
pondered:
• How could the company’s AI capabilities drive its well-being agenda in the coming
years?
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
RIMAC OVERVIEW
RIMAC was owned by Grupo Breca, a diversified business conglomerate in Peru. With
a customer base of about 3 million and $3.1 billion in assets under management, RIMAC
provided all classes of insurance and reinsurance. Its key businesses included personal
insurance (life, health, auto) and property insurance (fire, hull, aviation, etc.). The
company was a majority shareholder in Clinica Internacional, Peru’s largest private
healthcare network, and RIMAC Internacional EPS, an HMO 1 health insurance
company. RIMAC was headquartered in Lima and had several offices in the main
provinces of Peru (see Exhibit 1 for company overview).
No aspect of our lives has the potential to be more personalized than well-
being. To provide well-being products and services, we definitely needed
to start the journey to customize our offer using data, AI, algorithms and a
strong analytics platform.
through a network of physicians. HMO plans typically have lower monthly premiums than a PPO
(Preferred Provider Organization) plan.
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
Fernando’s first challenge was to convince the board that data and analytics needed to
be used differently, and significant investments would be required to build new
capabilities. Fernando explained:
After several discussions the board agreed, and the budget to invest in advanced
analytics was released.
Miguel found that the company already had a small data warehouse, but that the data
was only being used in traditional ways – mainly for reporting, creating predefined
dashboards and providing BI that enabled (some) decision making. Given its small size,
the BI group could only serve a third of the organization and aspects like data governance
and data management were not mature. There was significant potential to upskill the
team and operate on a more advanced level. The business side was also not
accustomed to using data in different ways – they did not know where to find it, what it
meant and how to use structured query language (SQL) or BI queries to extract
information from it.
Given this starting point, Miguel realized that, in the short and medium term, value was
not going to come from advanced analytics and AI, but rather from getting the data in
order. Initially, the data scientists delivered on a five-in-one role (data collection and
cleaning, as well as model creation, deployment and monitoring). They even struggled
to get enough data to build training datasets. They had to reach out to several BUs,
extract data on their own and figure out whether or not the data was consistent (e.g., if
there were two datasets, which one was closer to the ground truth).
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
In the first year, the key areas of focus were data governance (including quality and
remediation), data democratization and availability, and the creation of a data platform.
There were many obstacles to collecting and aggregating data from the core IT systems
in order to create a central data lake. It required new processes and new architecture for
capturing data and standardizing the various streams, which involved complete migration
and re-factorization. It also called for new skillsets – cloud engineering and modern data
architecture – that were not easily available in the Peruvian and Latin American markets.
Only then could the data scientists access the data in order to build and deploy AI
models. Miguel emphasized:
All these big, important things were not sexy, but they needed to be put in
place for the company to be data-driven so that people could look at
reports and trust the numbers. The hardest thing to do was to make sure
that the company had the necessary guardrails and systems in place,
which in turn would allow for superior value creation with AI and analytics.
Miguel’s team interacted with the business to understand the pain points and build a
solution. This was not easy since the team was new to insurance and had limited domain
knowledge. They had to make several presentations and iterations to ensure that the
solution worked for the user, and that the right business stakeholders were in the room
to provide feedback. They started with basic classification models (such as regression)
and gradient boosting techniques. Running the model each month using new data in
order to provide the BU with up-to-date projects involved a great deal of manual work.
Some early successes included:
Initially, the fledgling team simply supplied what the BU asked for without exploring the
underlying problem. This created a new issue: Each data scientist, being research-
oriented, used his or her own creativity to build the predictive models. Building the
algorithms took time because the data scientists were often perfectionists and
accustomed to working alone as opposed to co-creating with the business partners. They
did come up with interesting models but were unable to scale them up to become a part
of the business strategy. Also, there was increasing duplication. Putting each model into
production took months and integrating them took additional months.
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
My challenge to the team was that the business should feel that the solution
is theirs. If the business partner/user cannot explain our algorithm, then we
are not successful. We had to change mindsets and ways of working.
A new role – project lead – was created and three people were appointed to liaise with
the businesses to drive co-creation and validation of the solutions. Communication was
key. The project leads and Rosario spent at least 50% of their time understanding the
business problem or the strategic opportunity to enhance impact. The CoE then moved
on to atypical/unstructured data – such as audio for speech analytics and images for
computer vision – to which they applied more sophisticated algorithms and deep learning
techniques.
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Capturing value from the AI models is faster in some divisions like ours
because we can contact the right customers straight away and start
making recovery more efficiently (as compared to new customer
acquisition which takes longer). With the correct models, we can
personalize the best day, time and channel to follow up on collections.
The success of these use cases was measured by two types of metrics – business-
related KPIs (such as new sales, bottom line improvement, etc.) and analytics-related
KPIs (such as accuracy, precision, effort required and correlation between predictive
power and business KPI). In two years, RIMAC’s net promoter score (NPS) increased
from 20 to 53. The biggest improvement was in the vehicle insurance business which
saw a jump in NPS from 18 to 70, largely attributed to the positive impact of the above-
mentioned analytics models in handling claims and improving customer assistance.
Prioritization
As the CoE gained momentum, it started experiencing greater pull from the businesses.
Rosario stated:
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
To make go/no-go decisions, the CoE evaluated initiatives using three criteria – feasibility
based on data availability, execution readiness of the BUs and potential impact (measured
as the discounted present value of incremental revenues or reduced costs). For example,
the customer service unit wanted the CoE to build an “agenda” model so that the
salespeople could prioritize which leads to follow-up. While it was clear that the potential
impact would be significant, the data was not available. Miguel explained:
Scaling up
In 2021, Miguel left RIMAC. Fernando decided to move the CoE under the marketing
department, with Rosario reporting to the chief marketing officer. At the same time, the
data engineering team was moved under the IT department. The rationale for having the
data engineering team under IT was the interconnected nature of the work – processes,
control mechanism, applications, supporting infrastructure, cybersecurity, etc.
The CoE, comprising about 20 people, was divided into three groups (see Exhibit 2 for
the CoE organizational structure):
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
AI Factory
To standardize processes and scale up model deployment for high-quality solutions, the
CoE established an AI Factory (see Exhibit 3 for AI Factory functions and process flow).
Another goal was to share knowledge and best practices, thereby reducing effort, time and
costs. The planning of the AI factory included all parties – users who benefited from the
models’ insights/predictions (BUs), the data providers (the data engineering team under IT
and the BUs) and those who would put the technology into production alongside other IT
systems (IT department). The AI Factory enabled a shift from providing algorithms and
predictions in piecemeal fashion to working with the P&L owners on business problems
and strategizing how to create value. The AI Factory’s key elements were:
• MLOps Platform. This platform transformed the algorithms built by the data
scientists into consumable solutions via API channels. About 20 solutions
were being productized in various business areas.
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
Roberto hired 10 people to create a dedicated team that worked for more than a year to
organize and structure claims data. It started with complex business intelligence.
Subsequently, the team created customer health profiles to distinguish between chronic,
high-risk and healthy people. They then used analytics to design incentives and programs
so that the customers would work towards maintaining their health. For example, they
created a model to see how people with diabetes would fare over time – with and without
treatment. Sharing this kind of data with customers not only nudged them toward better
health choices but also showed them how much money they could save.
The team also co-created models with the CoE to identify use, abuse and fraudulent
claims. Instances of undesirable use of health insurance policies were revealed. The
business began monitoring such behavior and invited customers to the company’s local
offices to understand why they had made so many appointments or obtained
prescriptions for several drugs. Health-related claims by these high-use customers
dropped from 92% to 75%.
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Not everyone has the right attitude to change. You have to hire people
from outside who share your dreams and your mindset, and who know the
value of this change. It is important to start small to capture value, to
demonstrate the value, to create momentum and then to scale.
Both Miguel and Rosario were change ambassadors. The CoE had learned a great deal
as it had grown, and in particular developed the ability to follow RIMAC’s strategy and
co-create with the businesses. This was easy to say but finding the pathways to work
together in pursuit of quantifiable strategy-related KPIs for every solution being deployed
in the business was hard.
CHALLENGES
In four years, RIMAC had come a long way to become a data-driven company. Initial
skepticism and resistance to change decreased as the business generated value from
the direct impact on customers. Yet by mid-2022, some challenges remained:
• Availability and quality of data. RIMAC needed to know its customers in terms of
qualitative information: their needs, lifestyles and expectations – not just
demographic data. Despite significant progress, there were still gaps. Milagros
Rosell, vice president of customer experience, noted:
We need not just macro but also micro data to personalize the CRM
[Customer Relationship Management] program. For example, we don’t
have lifecycle data such as churn or renewal by channel. We need to work
further on pricing, renewal, churn and retention models that will help us to
prioritize – giving better prices or add-ons to the best customers to improve
retention, reaching out to those customers who have a propensity to churn
or making proactive efforts to engage detractors who might have had to a
bad experience and improve their perception about RIMAC.
• Limited data sharing across BUs. For example, the life insurance business knew
who its best clients were but was unaware if the same customer was a good one for
vehicle and health insurance as well. Makaly Rivera, vice president of life insurance,
stated:
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
The two teams have two different mindsets, and both are pressured by the
circumstances of the job to be done. The data team is trying to have as
much data as possible – this additional variable or that additional field –
while the analytics team is focused on the customer request. It's quite
difficult to harmonize both groups, and we are still working on the
interaction between the two.
• Addressing increased demand from BUs. Initially, in an effort to deliver quick wins,
the CoE had focused on the auto and health insurance areas. Life insurance,
however, which was one of the largest BUs, had not yet been adequately addressed.
Some 50% of the costs in the life insurance business were the indirect costs of data,
analytics, IT and marketing because cost allocation was based on the number of
customers. But the value was not yet visible. For example, the business had some
scores which allowed salespeople to identify which customers were likely to stay with
the company, but it still lacked scores that could highlight customer preference at the
product level. The businesses were also asking for more predictive models with
greater accuracy based on an integrated view of the customer.
• Alignment of objectives. The CoE had its objectives and key results (OKRs) and
goals. These included generating $9.5 million in incremental gross profits in 2021.
However, the BUs within which this value was to be created did not have these
specific objectives. This meant that they did not necessarily prioritize resources,
bandwidth or efforts to implement (or help create) the models. Going forward, RIMAC
realized that it needed to move to a scheme with shared OKRs between the CoE and
the BUs.
So far, we have been doing speech analytics after the fact (using
recordings). Can we do it in real time? Also, the principal channel for
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
• New priorities for the CoE. It was essential to expand the team, build superior AI
capabilities and forge new collaborations (with external partners) to gain time-to-
market. For example, RIMAC held a hackathon which attracted 500 participants. The
event not only brought new ideas but also created a brand name for RIMAC as a
technologically advanced insurance company. Additionally, to identify areas of
collaboration, Fernando, Rosario and certain business heads visited Israel in early
2022 and interacted with more than 20 startups and venture capital funds. Fernando
stated:
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
To execute the strategy, new well-being platforms with data at the core would need to
be built. This major project kicked off in 2022 and it called for greater resources – budget,
talent, capabilities and processes. Conceptually, it was difficult to put the customer at the
center because traditionally the norm had been to think of the business in terms of
products. In contrast to insurance touchpoints that occurred only couple of times in a
year, typically at difficult moments, well-being would shift RIMAC to a more positive and
ongoing relationship. For its new well-being platform called Estar Bien, RIMAC would
need to start combining internal data with big data to create real-time customization. With
Estar Bien up and running in the near future, the data provided by the customer to the
platform could be made available to all the BUs, thereby creating the opportunity for
RIMAC to become a trusted advisor and improve customers’ lives.
With the goal of becoming a protection and a well-being company, Fernando started
penning his agenda for the management team meeting, “Our ambition is to move into
new territory, and well-being will help us become closer to our customers….”
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
15
Exhibit 1: RIMAC Overview 2022
Source: Company
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RIMAC: HOW A PERUVIAN INSURANCE COMPANY IS SCALING AI
Source: Company
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17
Exhibit 3: AI Factory Functions and Process Flow
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18
Exhibit 3 (continued)
Source: Company
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