BizCover stands up connectors 90% faster

Key results

• Quicker and more accurate insights into key business metrics such as Loss Ratio
• Reduced time to create a connector by 90% - from 40-80 hours to 4-8 hours.

Background: making business insurance easy

• Company size: 150
• Industry: Insurance
• ‍Pipeline: Fivetran‍
• Cloud Platform: AWS
• Destination: Snowflake
• Use case: Finance analytics, Marketing Analytics
• Connectors: Google Analytics, SQL Server, Amazon S3, Facebook Ads, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, Jira, Google Ads, Google Search Console, Instagram Business, Sharepoint, LinkedIn Ad Analytics, Microsoft Advertising, Github, Webhooks, AWS Lambda, Fivetran Log‍

BizCover is Australia’s largest online business insurance – 180,000 SMEs currently protect their business through BizCover’s proprietary platform.

BizCover's founders were troubled by the merry-go-round small businesses had to go on just to get the right insurance cover. So, in 2008 they set out to give small businesses a fair go. In an industry dominated by big players, time-consuming paperwork, a lack of transparency and poor service levels, they boldly disrupted the insurance market by creating BizCover - an online service to simplify comparing and buying business insurance from some of Australia’s leading insurers. 

To date, over one million business insurance policies have been sold through the BizCover platform across Australia, New Zealand and the US. BizCover also provides market-leading solutions to the General Insurance Broking Industry through their BizCover for Brokers and ExpressCover brands.

The cost-intensive exercise of connecting data

Frequently incorporating digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and automation across its platform, innovation is at the heart of BizCover.

So, when the company needed to connect data from various sources, BizCover’s team of engineers built the connectors themselves using their own code. Each connector was unique, requiring anywhere from 40 to 80 hours of engineering time.

While this initially worked when connecting and syncing data from their database and Google Analytics, the task quickly became too much as the data sources increased. BizCover needed to pull data from more than 20 data sources into its centralised Snowflake data warehouse – with each source requiring its own connector.

“The challenge was that we couldn’t scale it. If there were changes that needed to be made, we had to do it all ourselves” said Jimmo Vink, Head of Information Management. “Even if we could build them relatively quickly, managing them became a big overhead, so we needed to offload that.”

The company’s data engineers were managing this largely manual process, and BizCover needed to disseminate the insights they were gaining from the data across the core business more efficiently. 

Enter Fivetran

With more data sources needing to be connected across the company’s many departments – Marketing, Sales and Analytics to name a few – the Information Management team searched for a solution.

By mid-2021, Snowflake recommended Fivetran as a contender to help deliver results. They began a proof-of-concept pilot run, which includes a 14-day free trial on any new connectors. To their surprise, the Information Management team immediately found Fivetran's platform easy to use.

“The onboarding process with Fivetran was straightforward, and they were incredibly helpful and great to work with,” said Jimmo. “The documentation was fantastic and they answered all of our questions around the security of our data.” On top of that, the Information Management team found it was extremely helpful to have Fivetran there as a conduit and advocate for any challenges experienced throughout the onboarding process.

One of the challenges the team faced early on was with one of the Marketing Analytics data sources. The source has multiple restrictions on how you can access data – some documented, some not. The team discovered that in one of their custom reports, the number of records they could ingest to the data warehouse through Fivetran was capped at 10,000, even if there was more data.

“With Fivetran, we raised a support ticket regarding an issue with one of the sources and within an hour got help from them,” said Jimmo. “Even though that wasn’t Fivetran’s issue, they helped us understand where the problem was and how we could go about solving it.”

Streamlining processes

Previously, the BizCover team would take 1-2 weeks to build their own connectors. With Fivetran, the BizCover team can set up a connector in just 4-8 hours, a 90% decrease in time and cost. Before Fivetran, bringing on a new data set involved a lot of people power, as exemplified by their Google Search Console connection.

“Analytics would come to us and say they needed to connect this new data set. We would first sit in a meeting, speak about what’s needed, and go away to work out how to build it,” said Jimmo. “We would then come back to agree on the logistics of building it, then spend weeks building the connection and working out any bugs.”

After all that, someone would have to be assigned to manage it. “Now we go into Fivetran and look for the connector. We authenticate and run the connection, and within half an hour, we have the connector running.”

Within just a few hours, the analytics team now has access to the data they need – that’s the power of Fivetran.The process is streamlined in terms of time, people power, and cost. “Fivetran is an automated solution designed for efficiency. Their business is all about integrating data. It’s fantastic,” said Jimmo.

Democratising data company-wide

Overall, the benefits of Fivetran were established rapidly across the Information Management team and the whole organisation. Previously, if something failed in the manual system, there were no alerts and inaccurate data would go undetected, ending up in the hands of decision makers.

With Fivetran’s turn-key automated alerts, BizCover minimises the risk of reporting or acting on inaccurate data. This has been a major benefit for the team; they can now focus on using the data instead of building their pipelines and connectors. 

From Finance, Analytics, and IT to Product, Marketing, and Sales, any part of the business that needs reporting and business data has felt the benefits of the Fivetran since its implementation. Many companies like BizCover have attained deeper integrations and scalability by implementing Fivetran. 

“There has been a material shift, and we take it for granted,” says Jimmo. “We can spend more time working and understanding the data and getting value from it rather than worrying about getting it in.”

“While it’s hard it’s hard to gauge the overall customer impact, we plan to implement advanced analytic and machine learning models powered by Fivetran data that will drive customer value and enhance the customer experience - so watch this space.”