National Life Wins Industry Award

Thanks to our innovative IT Team, National Life has been selected as the winner of the Datos Insights 2023 Impact Award for Life/Annuity/Benefit IT Practices, a distinction used to recognize insurer technology initiatives that generate real business value for their organizations.

National Life is the first carrier to achieve these results for the time, effort and money dedicated to the project, hence the industry recognition by the Dato Insights Insurer Chief Information Officer Council, a team of nearly 400 insurer CIOs or CIO equivalents.

At National Life, we are committed to protecting our customer data. With this commitment in mind, our Test Data Management (TDM) team developed a solution to keep our customers’ most sensitive information safeguarded while data testing is performed. The initiative randomizes customer data in test environments to ensure that no developers or testers have access to personally identifiable information (PII) about our customers. The data, although jumbled to protect sensitive information, still resembles company production data and is used by teams to conduct authentic tests. 

Safeguarding customer data is a problem that many, if not all, carriers struggle with. Most will buy expensive software and spend years trying to implement solutions that are usually incomplete or fail to solve the problem. Instead, the TDM team created an innovative, frugal solution using software it already owned, and the results were impressive by industry standards. Not only has our TDM team been able to remediate a $700M cyber risk and reduce test data setup time by 75%, but it is also expecting stronger test data that will ultimately result in a 30% reduction in production application defects. 

Congrats to all involved with this project and a big thanks to the “Data Protectors” Team that included Steve Thomson, Nidhi Upadhyaya, Kalai Thangamani, Pratima Khatri, Minh Pham, Hareesh Komarneni, Padma Surabhi, Shabin Navas, Shankar Gajula, and Moin Khan! 

Those who would like to learn more about this initiative or award are encouraged to contact Matt Malmgren or Patrick Meany.