WTW accelerates delivery time with Azure migration and analytics

Data-driven solutions for the world’s largest loyalty programs

Operating in more than 140 countries with over 40,000 employees, WTW has decades of experience working with the world’s largest loyalty programs. WTW actuaries use LoyaltyAdvisor to manage customer loyalty point redemption and assess the financial liability of unredeemed points for its clients.

Loyalty programs are a great asset for many companies, as they can increase customer retention and engagement. The largest loyalty programs realize more than one billion dollars of annual revenue from point sales. However, unredeemed points can pose a sizable financial risk—ranging from hundreds of millions to several billion dollars. As such, it is crucial for companies to closely monitor their loyalty program’s performance. 

LoyaltyAdvisor provides data management, predictive analytics, and insights so that WTW can predict future member behavior, explore what-if scenarios, and receive fast, actionable analytics. 

Efficiency, performance, and speed

While WTW has worked with loyalty programs for decades, recent innovations in artificial intelligence inspired a paradigm shift toward more granular data, larger volumes of data, and sophisticated machine learning algorithms. The reason was simple: the more data per client, the higher the opportunity to find correlations among drivers that predict customer behavior. To handle the explosion in the volume of data and the fast pace of innovation, the platform needed to move to a cloud environment designed with segregation of customer data, built with independent governance, and geared for performance efficiency. In addition, WTW needed a solution that could easily manage analytic workloads of over 80 to 200 terabytes of active data per client. 

A fully interoperable environment with Microsoft

WTW needed a platform that was aligned to the broader Microsoft cloud environments operated at WTW. “Our technology and support teams are very familiar with the Microsoft environment; they feel ‘at home’ in the common design language, as well as the interoperability across the Azure Analytics suite. That was a big motivation as we looked at the ability to meet our short and long-term goals,” says Nigel Davis, Technology Director for Risk Analytics, Climate, and Innovation at WTW. In addition, collaboration across the companies was a key factor in the project’s success, particularly the expertise of the WTW actuaries and Microsoft Azure environment experts. “Microsoft really jumped at the opportunity. It devoted resources and continues to remain deeply involved,” says Manolis Bardis, Senior Director at WTW. 

Davis adds, “The goal of going with a Microsoft solution was to enable our actuaries to operate in a scalable, secure, and familiar environment.” 

Building an agile and automatic Azure architecture

WTW has migrated all its workloads to Azure, leveraging its cloud-native development and deployment environment along with its intelligent data analytics services. The analytics solution consists of Microsoft Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and Azure Databricks. Synapse cleans and shapes the data to uncover insights with algorithms. Data Factory uses built-in connectors to ingest and integrate data. Data Lake Storage Gen2 provides easy storage and management for large volumes of raw data. Databricks uses machine learning models to prepare, transform, and enrich data. 

Every time WTW actuaries add a new client, they create a new environment with the necessary components on demand. Azure Active Directory, Azure Monitor, Azure Cost Management, and Azure Policy provide security and compliance across the entire process. This is to ensure the data is protected, properly assessed, and distributed correctly.

“We’re getting the benefits of cloud elasticity while minimizing the number of technology specialists needed to manage, patch, and maintain servers so we can be more agile,” says Davis.

More intelligence and analytics in less time

Work that previously took 5 days now takes an average of only 7 hours. “Our employees have more time to focus on what they’re accomplishing with the system. It gives them more time to scale the platform, refine our analytics, and uncover new insights for our clients,” says Davis. 

Overall, Azure provides WTW with a more user-friendly environment. “The new process is set in a much more intuitive environment, which makes our work that much easier. The team is very happy with the new environment,” says Bardis.

Continued innovation for better results

The solution has brought greater control and agility to LoyaltyAdvisor. Specific dashboards within LoyaltyAdvisor help WTW provide transparency on how the platform is used. In addition, it gives WTW a feedback loop on how to optimize the process for performance gains and quicker turnarounds for its clients. “We have a new user-friendly environment, we have the support of Microsoft, and we’re moving to the next generation of service for our clients. We could not have asked for a better outcome,” says Bardis.

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