Japan Post Insurance at Snowflake World Tour Tokyo
The Snowflake World Tour stopped by in Tokyo on September 11 & 12, with some interesting Finance case studies on the agenda. This presentation details the successful project by Japan Post (Kampo) Life Insurance, one of Japan's largest life insurers, to overhaul its data analytics infrastructure using Snowflake. The project was driven by a company-wide Digital Transformation (DX) strategy to become more "customer-centric" by breaking down data silos and creating a unified view of the customer across the entire Japan Post Group.
Company Overview and Scale
- Company Name: 株式会社かんぽ生命保険 (Kampo Life Insurance Co., Ltd.)
- Customer Base: Approximately 16.92 million customers, which represents about 14% of Japan's total population. They also have touchpoints with the broader Japan Post Group customer base.
- Total Assets: ¥59.5 trillion (consolidated).
- Vast Physical Network: Insurance products are sold through 20,318 post offices across Japan, a number greater than the total number of elementary schools or police boxes in the country.
- Organizational Structure: The company operates 82 branches and 626 service departments.
- Employees: A total of 17,952 employees, with 9,486 of them being sales staff.
Historical Context and Evolution
The presentation frames the company's history in three distinct eras, which explains the technical challenges they faced:
State-Run Era (国営時代)
- Founded in 1916 as the "Simple Life Insurance Business."
- Characterized by siloed organizational structures and a lack of in-house IT talent, making them highly dependent on external vendors for system development. This is the root cause of their fragmented legacy systems.
Privatization (民営化)
- In 2007, it was officially incorporated as Kampo Life Insurance as part of the privatization of Japan Post.
- This event marked the beginning of major reforms to adapt its business model and systems to compete with other private insurance companies.
Modern Post-Privatization Era (民営化後)
- Listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2015.
- This period has been defined by major modernization efforts, including overhauling core systems, digitizing operations, and undertaking a significant migration to the cloud to drive their digital transformation.
This background is crucial as it establishes Kampo Life as a massive, deeply-rooted institution with a century of history, whose legacy infrastructure presented significant hurdles that the Snowflake project was designed to overcome.
Key Challenges Before Snowflake
- Fragmented Systems: Multiple, siloed data analysis systems existed across different departments, leading to inefficiency and data fragmentation.
- Scalability Issues: Legacy on-premises systems could not handle growing data volumes, with some analysis jobs taking all night to run.
- High Costs: Maintaining multiple aging systems resulted in significant and rising license and maintenance costs.
- Inefficient Collaboration: Sharing data with other Japan Post Group companies relied on slow, cumbersome, and maintenance-heavy file transfer processes.
Key Project Achievements
The project delivered significant, measurable improvements and strategic capabilities, validated through a successful Proof of Concept (PoC) and phased implementation.
Massive Performance Improvement
- Data Ingestion: A large data insertion task (9 million rows) that previously took 1 hour and 16 minutes on their on-premise system was completed in just 58 seconds on a Snowflake XS Warehouse.
- Data Updates: A complex update process that took 26 minutes on-prem was reduced to 2 minutes and 15 seconds in Snowflake.
Significant Cost Reduction
- The PoC demonstrated that Snowflake's storage costs were approximately 37% of a competing cloud RDBMS product ($46/TB vs. $122.88/TB), delivering substantial cost savings and proving a strong business case for the migration.
Breaking Down Silos for Inter-Company Collaboration
- A key strategic achievement was the successful implementation of Snowflake Data Sharing between Kampo Life and Japan Post.
- Despite having no prior experience with the technology, they were able to replace slow, batch-based file transfers with secure, real-time data sharing. This was accomplished in a short timeframe through a collaborative effort involving both companies and hands-on support from Snowflake Professional Services.
Creation of a Unified, Future-Ready Platform
- The project successfully established a central, cloud-native data platform to serve as the single source of truth for the entire company.
- This new infrastructure is designed to be the foundation for future initiatives, including company-wide AI utilization and a fully unified analysis environment where all business users can access and analyze data from a common platform.
The project highlights how Kampo Life Insurance leveraged Snowflake not just to solve immediate performance and cost issues but to build a strategic data foundation that enables seamless collaboration, breaks down historical data silos, and prepares the company for a data-driven, AI-enabled future.
Norbert Gehrke
