Acko: Building an intuitive and efficient insurance platform for customers on a secure data warehouse
About Acko
Acko is a digital insurance platform based in India. It is dedicated to solving real-world problems for its customers by leveraging data analytics, and offers a range of insurance, from automotive to integrated employee health benefits. Its platform also provides customers with access to embedded e-commerce product insurance, and travel insurance, among other insurance offerings.
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Contact usAcko migrates to a data warehouse seamlessly, improving compliance reporting while building its platform on a secure environment that's set for growth.
Google Cloud results
- Hands over daily operational reporting tasks to analysts without worrying about infrastructure
- Improves performance of poorly running jobs by 5x
- Achieves productivity boost as team, is able to focus on solving business problems, rather than managing infrastructure
Improves turnaround time for reporting requests by 3-4X
As a leading digital insurance company in India, Acko is on a mission to simplify the way people buy and access insurance. Instead of working with agents, Acko serves customers directly and provides insurance coverage for cars, bikes, health, as well as employee health insurance for organizations. "We are a protection destination for consumers, without the middleman," explains Gaurav Gupta, Vice President at Acko.
"We started as a fairly small company, so being in a traditional database worked well for us. However, as we continued to grow and scale, we started noticing bottlenecks and decided to shift to a warehousing system, and that's when we started exploring Google Cloud."
—Gaurav Gupta, Vice President, AckoThe startup was launched in 2016 on a traditional database. "We started as a fairly small company, so being in a traditional database worked well for us. However, as we continued to grow and scale, we started noticing bottlenecks and decided to shift to a warehousing system, and that's when we started exploring Google Cloud," says Gaurav Gupta, Vice President at Acko.
The company was initially on a different cloud provider for its main infrastructure. However, as the number of users continued to grow, fulfilling monthly compliance reports became a challenge. Acko could no longer run its reporting directly from the production servers as it would result in bottlenecks, impacting the organization's service level agreements (SLA).
"Our first move was to explore the warehousing solution on the cloud provider we were already on, but after a few months, we found various infrastructure challenges. This is when we decided to look into Google Cloud and BigQuery, where we found the dev experience to be flawless," says Tapo B, Engineering Manager at Acko. Today, Acko uses BigQuery as its foundational data warehouse.
Solving early infrastructure management challenges with BigQuery
As a startup, Acko operated with a lean team and most of its engineers happened to be more familiar with traditional databases. "Our ecosystem wasn't too developed either, so it was challenging for us to set up and maintain the various pipelines manually for a successful migration to a data warehouse," says Tapo B.
"Our experience with BigQuery was truly transformative, and even our analysts have a fantastic experience using it. The best part is the intuitiveness of the tool, which means that analysts can pick up and go from day one without any training."
—Tapo B, Engineering Manager, AckoWith BigQuery, the team found the data migration experience to be seamless. "BigQuery has readily available integrations, hence, we simply focused on making sure that the data was imported and pipelines were in place," says Tapo B.
Since deploying BigQuery, Acko has improved turnaround times for reporting requests by three to four times. "We have hundreds of TBs of data where queries that produced results almost instantly. It was a fundamental shift in our experience with compliance reporting," shares Gupta.
To set up the pipelines, Acko leverages Dataflow to process data for its scalable and near real-time data pipeline requirements and Cloud Composer to run all its data pipeline orchestrations. These out-of-the-box solutions meant that Acko's Data Platform team could easily plug in the solutions to be deployed instantly.
"Our experience with BigQuery was truly transformative, and even our analysts have a fantastic experience using it. The best part is the intuitiveness of the tool, which means that analysts can pick up and go from day one without much training," shares Tapo B. By letting analysts run their own reporting, the Data Platform team can focus their attention on other business challenges.
Building upon an existing Google Cloud ecosystem
With a confident start on BigQuery, Acko has since explored a suite of different tools on Google Cloud. As a result, Gupta says the organization has seen a significant gain in performance for some of its previously poorly running jobs by 5x.
Acko now hosts its data platform applications on Google Kubernetes Engine for scalability and stores its application logs on the Operations Suite with alerting rules configured on top of it.
Cloud SQL is used as its data platform application database and Pub/Sub fulfills its queuing requirements.
As users of Google Workspace, Acko has a straightforward path to integrate and onboard new associates to Google Cloud. This also makes implementing Google Cloud tools seamless, and engineers can easily outsource platform governance to the IT support team to be managed centrally, in a secure environment.
Maintaining a secure cloud environment that meets stringent security standards
As an insurance platform, data security is paramount for Acko. The security certifications that Google Cloud has been awarded are a big value-add for the company since they do not have to worry about compliance audits.
"On the data side, we need to safeguard our customers' Personal Identifiable Information (PII), and BigQuery provides the necessary constructs to configure these security systems without requiring us to go into too much detail," shares Vishwanath Ramarao, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Acko.
He adds that the granular level of access and control that Google Cloud enables also provides the visibility needed to integrate with other systems.
Powering Acko's Customer Data Platform
Acko is a consumer direct, digital first insurance company that relies on in-depth customer understanding. "Because our business model is direct to customer, it is vitally important for us to understand our customers and support their needs," says Ramarao. "Google Cloud powers our Customer Data Platform (CDP) helping us reach our customers at the right time with the right message. Our Google Cloud-powered CDP helps us automate renewal reminders, avoid policy lapses and market new offers and services," Ramarao explains.
"Google Cloud powers our Customer Data Platform (CDP) helping us reach our customers at the right time with the right message. Our Google Cloud powered CDP helps us automate renewal reminders, avoid policy lapses and market new offers and services."
—Vishwanath Ramarao, Chief Product and Technology Officer, AckoAcko also uses Google Cloud technologies as part of its ML-driven personalized pricing and discounting engine, and to fuel its internal business intelligence practice that swiftly provides actionable metrics to leaders.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Acko
Acko is a digital insurance platform based in India. It is dedicated to solving real-world problems for its customers by leveraging data analytics, and offers a range of insurance, from automotive to integrated employee health benefits. Its platform also provides customers with access to embedded e-commerce product insurance, and travel insurance, among other insurance offerings.