Who do you trust when the unexpected occurs? For the policy holders at West Bend Mutual Insurance, that’s an easy question to answer.

For over 130 years, West Bend Mutual Insurance (WBMI) has been a trusted name throughout the Midwest and beyond. It’s not just an insurance company, it’s mutually held, meaning it’s owned by the policy holders. When everyone has a shared stake, that’s not just a business. That’s a community.

Using available data to set premium rates is central to the work of insuring. But without the technology to process that data, actuaries are left making educated guesses.

Recognizing that, WBMI set out to leverage its data to deliver the most accurate, up-to-date estimates to its policy holders. To do so, the company needed to step up its tech stack, migrating from on-prem data and end-of-life programs to a cutting-edge cloud solution.

WBMI’s IT team called in a vendor to assist in the migration but faced culture-fit problems. The vendor insisted on a waterfall approach and did not embed its consultants in WBMI, resulting in friction and turmoil. WBMI had no choice but to end the relationship and seek out a different kind of consultancy. That’s when it called Slalom.

Moving on to a new partnership with Slalom was simple enough. But arriving in the wake of the previous troubled partnership meant the Slalom team needed to demonstrate our people-first approach right away.

“West Bend is a relationship company,” says Dan Gallegos, WBMI’s assistant vice president of Information Technology. “Everything we do starts with an agent selling our policies. We take that relationship culture, and we extend it to our associates, our customers, as well as our vendors. I felt that Slalom presented itself as someone who wanted a long-term relationship, not just a short-term contractual win.”

So what did it look like to build trust with WBMI? “Actually being there on the ground, being with them day-to-day, working alongside their engineers, upskilling them and also ourselves really made that trust grow, to the point that we have become real strategic partners, says Vamsi Kurakala, Slalom senior consultant. “We really had to earn that trust.”

Adds Matthew Byun, Slalom senior consultant, “We work with their teams every day. And, as we're doing this, we build ownership within the individual teams that we work with and upskill those team members that are part of the process. Our teams stay in close contact through every step of the engagement, and together, we’re co-creating solutions through an integrated Agile delivery approach.”

“The Slalom team are hard workers," says Tyler Lewis, an IT director focused on data at WBMI. “They have good ideas. They challenge us appropriately. They coach us appropriately and I would say it's been a very, very good partnership.” 

To process complex actuarial datasets and produce reliably precise predictions, a partnership of compatible technologies was required. “It’s taking those existing data processes using Databricks for ingestion, loading that into a data lake on Microsoft Azure storage, transforming that data in Snowflake and then visualizing in Power BI,” explains Byun. “They now have a modern tech stack that's able to scale insights at the need of their business.” 

“We were looking to get five years’ worth of general liability rate-making quality data at 99.99% financial accuracy ingested into Snowflake, for all of our actuarial and product management needs,” Gallegos explains. “And that’s what we did.”

The result? Accurate risk data that benefits policy holders, both in the event of an emergency, and as owners of the business.

“When we put money in the pockets of our owners, we're literally putting it in the pockets of our customers,” says Lewis. “We’re in the business of providing a pool of resources for these people so that when things go wrong, we're able to help them. And I love that. I love that we're able to help people. To put an accurate price to that is very valuable because if you get it wrong, you don't have the money to help people.”

Up next, WBMI is bringing this increased level of accuracy in ratemaking to more policyholders, starting with commercial property insurance, which has more complex data sets.

Meanwhile, the WBMI and Slalom continue to deepen the partnership, finding new ways to integrate Slalom to support the insurer. 

“We’ve had Slalom present twice at our internal IT conference in the last two years, one time on how to have a product mindset to really help our product owners and business analysts and engineering, and the second was on design thinking and how to change the way we do engineering projects,” says Gallegos. “There's business development, but I need you to do things just because it’s the right thing to do and Slalom does that all the time.”