From Batch to Real-Time: Accelerating Insurance Claims Processing with CDC and Spark
💼 Did you know? In the insurance sector, the move from overnight batch processing to real-time stream processing has been shown to reduce the average claims settlement time from several days to under an hour in highly automated systems.
Real-Time Data and Insurance
For data experts, the fundamental shift lies in viewing data as a continuous stream rather than discrete, time-boxed blocks. Change Data Capture (CDC) is the mechanism that facilitates this. CDC monitors and extracts row-level changes (insertions, updates, deletions) from source databases the moment they occur, transmitting them instantly. When coupled with Apache Spark, a unified analytics engine renowned for its ability to process massive datasets rapidly in a distributed manner, you create a robust pipeline.
The Challenge of Legacy Systems
The vast majority of insurers are still reliant on decades-old, batch-centric Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and policy administration systems.
Data is typically extracted and transformed overnight, a delay that creates significant business issues. This latency means fraud signals embedded in newly submitted claims or updated loss estimates are not analysed until the next day.
Furthermore, the inability to provide immediate settlement decisions leads to a poor customer experience, high call centre volume, and increased operational expenditure. Data teams spend disproportionate time managing fragile, complex ETL scripts that fail to scale, creating a massive technical debt.
The Data Integration Turbo-Charger
IOblend offers the architectural solution to simplify and operationalise these complex CDC and Spark pipelines.
- It is a powerful data integration application that provides a true end-to-end capability. For the insurer, IOblend’s Kappa-based architecture seamlessly handles CDC, ELT, and AI-driven ETL within a single low-code Designer, eliminating the need for multiple tools and heavy hand-coding of Spark jobs.
- IOblend automatically generates optimised Apache Spark jobs behind the scenes, allowing engineers to focus on business logic rather than distributed computing infrastructure.
- By accelerating data pipeline development 10× and reducing data management effort by 90%, IOblend enables teams to deliver the ultra-low latency required for production-grade real-time systems.
- They can directly embed AI agents into the ETL process to validate and analyse unstructured documents (like accident photos or police reports) alongside structured claims data, delivering a comprehensive, governed, and highly efficient claims environment.
Build your real-time claims future, faster and leaner, with IOblend.
IOblend presents a ground-breaking approach to IoT and data integration, revolutionizing the way businesses handle their data. It’s an all-in-one data integration accelerator, boasting real-time, production-grade, managed Apache Spark™ data pipelines that can be set up in mere minutes. This facilitates a massive acceleration in data migration projects, whether from on-prem to cloud or between clouds, thanks to its low code/no code development and automated data management and governance.
IOblend also simplifies the integration of streaming and batch data through Kappa architecture, significantly boosting the efficiency of operational analytics and MLOps. Its system enables the robust and cost-effective delivery of both centralized and federated data architectures, with low latency and massively parallelized data processing, capable of handling over 10 million transactions per second. Additionally, IOblend integrates seamlessly with leading cloud services like Snowflake and Microsoft Azure, underscoring its versatility and broad applicability in various data environments.
At its core, IOblend is an end-to-end enterprise data integration solution built with DataOps capability. It stands out as a versatile ETL product for building and managing data estates with high-grade data flows. The platform powers operational analytics and AI initiatives, drastically reducing the costs and development efforts associated with data projects and data science ventures. It’s engineered to connect to any source, perform in-memory transformations of streaming and batch data, and direct the results to any destination with minimal effort.
IOblend’s use cases are diverse and impactful. It streams live data from factories to automated forecasting models and channels data from IoT sensors to real-time monitoring applications, enabling automated decision-making based on live inputs and historical statistics. Additionally, it handles the movement of production-grade streaming and batch data to and from cloud data warehouses and lakes, powers data exchanges, and feeds applications with data that adheres to complex business rules and governance policies.
The platform comprises two core components: the IOblend Designer and the IOblend Engine. The IOblend Designer is a desktop GUI used for designing, building, and testing data pipeline DAGs, producing metadata that describes the data pipelines. The IOblend Engine, the heart of the system, converts this metadata into Spark streaming jobs executed on any Spark cluster. Available in Developer and Enterprise suites, IOblend supports both local and remote engine operations, catering to a wide range of development and operational needs. It also facilitates collaborative development and pipeline versioning, making it a robust tool for modern data management and analytics
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