The Clear Group

The Client and the Challenge   

Clear Insurance Management, part of the Clear Group, is an independent insurance broker specialising in the UK corporate and SME market. Since its foundation in 2001, Clear has established its reputation through sustainable growth, strategically acquiring a multitude of value-aligned businesses. This has enabled the company to expand its commercial and professional insurance product offerings across a wide variety of market sectors. Goldman Sachs financially backed the Clear Group in mid-2022. This partnership has accelerated the strength and growth of the business across the UK, as well as Ireland and mainland Europe. 

“Our business growth strategy is based on acquiring small insurance brokers that enable us to offer broad and bespoke sector specialist insurance solutions. To give an idea of scale, we’ve integrated around 15 in the last two years. They tend to have very basic IT systems and processes in place, and little or no data management or analytics capabilities,” explains Andrew McNaught, Head of Data and MI at The Clear Group. “We want to be in a position to increase the profitability of each new business itself, rather than just adding a bit of extra performance across the group. So, the first thing we do after acquisition is migrate their data into our central broking system. The faster we can do that, the sooner we can help the business reach its full potential.”  

He continues: “But we had a problem. We were running an on-premises, server-based SQL data warehouse out of our London offices. It took around 20 months for an acquired company’s data to be integrated into our central broking system. Before that happens, it’s hard to track performance in a way that’s meaningful for our stakeholders. So, there’s no doubt from my perspective that these delays impacted our ability to meet growth targets and additional reporting requirements from Goldman Sachs.”  

The legacy data architecture also posed a significant financial challenge. “It was scalable to a point,” Andrew concedes. “But we had to pay around £10,000 in licensing and software subscriptions for every analyst. This was not a viable option for us, particularly as we were increasing the pace of our acquisitions. It was clear that we couldn’t continue as we were and that the next logical step was to move to a cloud-based data warehouse environment.”  

The Solution 

“Node4 offered us a very competitive price to build a bespoke Microsoft Fabric framework and skeleton infrastructure. That’s something that we couldn’t have done ourselves. Pricing is so important in the current economic climate. It’s what gets you through the front door,” Andrew notes. “But Node4 won the business because of their openness and ability to listen and understand our requirements.” 

As a result, Andrew and his team now have a single source of data from which to conduct critical data analysis. This means they can deliver standardised performance reporting from individual companies and share comprehensive group-level data with their senior leadership team.  

“Node4 also carried out a full infrastructure refresh and helped us with modernising our IT infrastructure. There was an education piece, too,” Andrew explains. “Node4 spent time teaching us how to get the best out of Fabric, learning alongside them as they built the environment. This was important because, as a leader in a very lean business and IT department, I couldn’t afford to pay for a third-party to keep building solutions on top of solutions.”

Commenting specifically on Microsoft Fabric, Andrew says: “We have a unified, end-to-end analytics platform that combines data engineering, data warehousing, business intelligence, real-time analytics, and data science into a single, integrated environment. One that offers clean, logical processes and pipelines, and presents data in a clear and easy-to-understand format. It also automates a significant amount of data analysis work, too, which saves time and money and improves accuracy.”   

The Results

Quantifiable cost savings  

Andrew can already report measurable cost savings from the project: “We’ll be turning off several software subscription services in the coming weeks and months – services that are now integrated within Fabric. We estimate this will save the business around £20,000 each year,” he remarks. “The next step is to be able to shine a light on individual business performance and provide support where needed to hit targets. That’s when we’ll see the real ROI.”  

Andrew also notes that the project had a one-time upfront expense to cover the build. But after that, The Clear Group only pays for the analytics functionality when it’s used. “That’s particularly valuable to us because we could reasonably have a six-month gap between acquisitions,” Andrew explains. “It means we can scale our use, and our associated costs, directly in line with our acquisition strategy. Plus, of course, we also save money because we don’t need to physically maintain the IT infrastructure that housed our data warehouse.” 

A single source of truth 

Before rolling out Fabric, Andrew recalls that the business had relied on two data sources and dashboards to deliver company metrics: “People were spending more time trying to understand the differences between the two sources, rather than analysing the actual underlying business performance. Combining those two dashboards in Fabric gives us a single source of truth on a single pane of glass. It’s far more powerful, efficient and accurate. It’s also given us more insight into where to pivot operations and provide more focus. ”  

“Fabric provides us with new opportunities to interrogate the data. Importantly, it also presents and visualises information in an easy-to-understand way. In the longer term, thanks to Node4’s help and support, we’ll be able to build out more analytics tools and set smart, measurable KPIs. Having accurate and timely data and reports readily available makes a real difference. It creates the potential for more meaningful and productive conversations about targets and progress.”  

Andrew McNaught, Head of Data and MI at The Clear Group

Compliance and data security  

Andrew also notes the original system carried inherent data security risks, but that these have been addressed with the new analytics platform: “On joining the company – and before we started this project – I discovered that the data warehouse servers were out of warranty. I was also concerned about complying with data privacy and protection regulations when that data was siloed across multiple locations and sources. With Microsoft Fabric, all our data is in one place, which makes compliance with GDPR, DORA, and insurance industry-specific data protection legislation a lot easier,” he says. “Plus, with Node4’s guidance, we can take full advantage of the solution’s data encryption, data governance, advanced access control, and user permission functionality.”  

Solid data foundations for AI integration

Looking to the future, once all the data has been migrated to Fabric, Andrew believes the company will be in a strong position to investigate AI-driven data analytics use cases – something he could not previously consider as the legacy on-premises solution had limited scope for such integrations: “Once the data hygiene work is completed, we’ll have an accurate, reliable picture of how the entire business is performing at any given time. We can then start to think about training AI and machine learning models to do some fascinating and innovative analysis. But we must have those strong data foundations in place first, so this is very much a longer-term goal.” 

Andrew sums up the project: “The Node4 team was really easy to work with. They kept us involved and informed at every stage of the process, offering us the chance to learn more about Fabric’s features and functionality. The project was driven by a professional IT consultancy-led approach. But it still afforded opportunities for genuine collaboration and input. What’s truly exciting for me is that this is only the start of the journey—and we’re going to unlock many more benefits in the coming months and years.”

“The Node4 team was really easy to work with. They kept us involved and informed at every stage of the process, offering us the chance to learn more about Fabric’s features and functionality. The project was driven by a professional IT consultancy-led approach. But it still afforded opportunities for genuine collaboration and input. What’s truly exciting for me is that this is only the start of the journey—and we’re going to unlock many more benefits in the coming months and years.” 

Andrew McNaught, Head of Data and MI at The Clear Group