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DataRobot > Case Studies > At Sanlam, South African Financial Institution, AI Helps Attract, Retain More Customers
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At Sanlam, South African Financial Institution, AI Helps Attract, Retain More Customers

Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
  • Sales & Marketing
  • Business Operation
Use Cases
  • Predictive Maintenance
Services
  • Data Science Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Sanlam, Africa’s largest non-banking financial institution, exists with the purpose of empowering generations to be financially secure, prosperous, and confident. However, the company was facing challenges with its data science operations. The open-source AI options they were using felt cumbersome to navigate and lacked critical explainability for business stakeholders and compliance. This was hindering their ability to drive critical business value levers such as sales and client retention. The company needed a more streamlined and transparent AI solution that could help them improve their operations and deliver better results.
About The Customer
Sanlam is a purpose-led financial services group headquartered in South Africa, operating across a number of selected global markets. The company has been creating value for stakeholders since 1918—for more than 100 years—and is now the largest non-banking financial institution in Africa, in 33 African countries and 44 countries globally. Sanlam's mission is to empower generations to be financially secure, prosperous, and confident. The company uses data analytics to influence sales, improve client retention, help manage expenses, and support key strategic initiatives.
The Solution
Sanlam decided to implement the DataRobot AI Platform, which offered end-to-end automation capabilities. This platform allowed them to expedite and expand their AI efforts for both data scientists and actuaries. Through a managed cloud environment, the company was able to use the platform’s best-in-class MLOps capabilities, including model performance monitoring. The platform also offered multiple AutoML deployment options, including a JavaScript embedding approach as well as an API integration between Sanlam and DataRobot. With MLOps, they could monitor models in production for data drift and could see the features driving each model much more easily. By understanding those underlying data points, Sanlam was able to deliver essential explainability to stakeholders.
Operational Impact
  • Data scientists and actuaries are now empowered to build models in a streamlined fashion, significantly reducing model build times relative to an open-source statistical software environment.
  • With DataRobot AI Platform, Sanlam improved lapse rates for customer retention and unlocked value from sales campaigns with intelligent leads selection through predictive modeling.
  • The AI Platform transforms predictive analytics at Sanlam by simplifying the onboarding of new data scientists and empowering actuaries.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Before, creating models took up to a month. Now, the same model creation process takes only a couple of hours.
  • By spotting the factors that influence at-risk customers, Sanlam found that something as simple as a welcome message can positively influence customer lapse rates.

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