Skandia, the leading Swedish-based insurance company, is trialling a new test-data management platform launched in 2020.
Skandia is using X-AutoMate’s new framework for data quality management and test automation for its solvency reporting application.
“The possibility to follow up on test approaches instead of test cases increase the possibility to communicate with stakeholders on what QA improvements are needed, for example what is covered on what test level,” said an employee at Skandia.
Founded in Sweden in 2020, X-AutoMate launched its testing platform in 2021. The platform includes a library of 35 methodologies for analysing data flows. Based on open-source tools, the platform is technology agnostic, X-AutoMate claims, and is able to connect to data lakes on-prem, in the cloud, via VM or Kubernetes container. The platform includes two modules, offering test automation for data sources alongside simple data quality management.
By analysing the metadata of the sources, the testing framework defines test cases without observing data directly. This helps to minimise the security concerns and scalability issues involved with large data sets.
Know-your-customer (KYC) requirements at financial firms require high quality data, which can be difficult to acquire when environments become complex. Outcomes at one data source must be echoed throughout the data warehouse. By completing checks on data across the warehouse, X-AutoMate limits siloing and pushes the errors found in the warehouse left in the development cycle.
While most data quality management tools observe production data, X-AutoMate’s testing tool monitors the development pipeline and halts deployment before issues enter production, avoiding the slow and expensive process of patching large amounts of live data.
The tooling for test data compliance often lags behind other QA and development environments at financial firms. With the ability to verify and catalogue the complete data flow, including the semantic layers, X-AutoMate will replace more limited reporting tools, claims its head of product development, Bernes Maksumic (pictured).
So, for example, Skandia’s use of X-AutoMate for its Solvency reporting application, a complex system that took inputs from many ledgers, helps to meet the demand from regulators for strict standards for calculations and transformations made across multiple layers of data, so that outputs can be validated.