Initializing System...
Initializing System...
Building the data backbone for a growing insurance brokerage.
A fragmented insurance data environment reframed as a cloud-native analytics platform, connecting AWS infrastructure, centralised warehousing, and automated Power BI reporting into a clearer commercial decision system.
Data Platforms
Data was fragmented across on-premise PostgreSQL databases, the Acturis insurance platform, and manual spreadsheets. Leadership lacked a unified view of performance across teams and products, with manual reporting workflows creating significant operational bottlenecks.
A growing insurance brokerage operating across multiple product lines and insurer relationships. The business was scaling faster than its data infrastructure could support, and leadership decisions were being made on stale, inconsistently-calculated metrics from fragmented sources.
A cloud-native data architecture deployed on AWS via Terraform. The system replaces a fragmented on-premise stack with a centralised warehouse and automated Power BI dashboards, giving commercial teams clearer visibility without manual reporting loops.
A three-layer architecture: ingestion from Acturis and PostgreSQL into a staging layer on AWS RDS, transformation via dbt into a centralised warehouse, and a semantic layer powering Power BI reports.
Started by understanding what decisions leadership actually needed to make — retention strategy, product profitability, insurer performance — then worked backwards to the data infrastructure required. The goal was to eliminate the human bottleneck in reporting, not to build a technically impressive system that nobody used. Focused on reliability and self-service analytics over complexity.
The core design challenge was producing a consistent semantic layer despite messy source data. Used dbt tests to enforce data quality at the transformation stage and prevent bad data from reaching dashboards. Terraform ensured the infrastructure was reproducible and auditable. Chose PostgreSQL-compatible AWS RDS as the migration target to minimise retraining and reduce risk.