Guardian Group Modernizes Insurance with Faster, Smarter Data Analytics

Industry: Insurance | Services: Data and Analytics, Digital Consulting, Digital Operations

Client Overview

Guardian Group is one of the largest mutual life insurance companies in the world, offering a comprehensive portfolio of products and services, including life insurance, disability income insurance, annuities, and investment solutions.

In the US, the company’s nationwide presence includes over 3,000 financial representatives operating across more than 70 agencies. It also provides dental and vision insurance, serving more than 5 million dental participants through one of the largest dental networks in the country.

The Challenge

Improving Data Governance and Reporting Accuracy
The client managed fragmented data across multiple systems without a central repository. Dimensional modelling was not standardised, which slowed reporting and created delays in delivering critical business insights. These gaps reduced the organisation’s ability to make timely, data-driven decisions.

In addition, transactional and financial reports often took twice the required time to complete due to poor data quality, including issues such as null values, duplicate entries, and inaccurate timestamps.

These inefficiencies increased the risk of operational complexity and compliance penalties, raising costs further.

At the same time, the insurer needed more agility to respond to shifting customer expectations, evolving market demands, and new regulatory mandates — pressures that their existing data environment was unable to support.

Sutherland Solution

An End-to-End Analytics Transformation

Sutherland Cloud Analytics Platform turns raw data into a strategic asset, combining AI and advanced analytics to power decisions that boost growth, efficiency, and customer experience. For Guardian Group, this meant creating a scalable ecosystem that streamlined operations, strengthened financial performance, and improved service delivery.

• Financial and Operational Analytics
  AI-powered tools such as Suspense Amount Management enabled Guardian to allocate premium suspense amounts accurately, optimizing cash flows and improving critical financial ratios. In parallel, lapse accounts analytics provided visibility into agent performance, helping reduce attrition and strengthen account management practices.
• Process Efficiency and Customer Experience
  Automation and analytics modernized customer-facing and claims processes, cutting manual effort and speeding up turnaround times. Predictive models of customer and market behavior empowered Guardian to deliver more personalized and engaging experiences, ensuring digital adoption didn’t come at the expense of the human element.
• Profitability and Growth Analytics
  By deploying profitability analytics at the customer, agent, and policy level, Guardian gained clearer visibility into emerging risks and revenue opportunities. These insights enabled the organization to optimize enterprise-wide profitability and set the stage for sustainable growth.

The Outcome

Better Data Quality, Lower Costs, and Faster Reporting

Sutherland’s Cloud Analytics Platform and consulting expertise established an ongoing big data capability at Guardian Group — creating not just new tools, but a culture of using insights to guide business decisions.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Manual efforts and associated labor costs were reduced by roughly 25% as processes became more automated and streamlined. Claims-related turnaround times improved by 20%, giving policyholders faster resolutions and reducing operational bottlenecks. At the same time, 100% of forms were digitized and made available online, eliminating paper-based inefficiencies and improving accessibility for customers and agents alike.

Together, these results laid the foundation for Guardian Group to compete more effectively in a data-driven marketplace – with scalable analytics, faster decision-making, and a stronger customer experience.