Responsible Data Sharing in the Digital Economy: Big Data Governance Adoption in Bancassurance

Abstract

Bancassurance organizations, with its origin in Europe, have become a contemporary phenomenon in developing countries. Bancassurance organizations are typically formed by companies who expand their services to selling insurance products and services to their current customer base. The benefits are realized by both the bank and customers as banking customers who are potential customers in insurance houses and insurance policyholders who may have an interest in banking accounts. To enable this process, data is shared among the bank and the insurance house. Typically, information technology (IT) infrastructure and data resources interchangeably connect to enable data sharing. This might introduce not just infrastructure challenges but also considerations for governance dictating what data can be shared and the format of datasets. This case study investigated the big data governance structures currently adopted by bancassurance organizations in a developing country focusing on three main areas identified in literature. These areas include basic, foundation level big data governance structures, data quality and the adoption of guidelines and frameworks with subsequent business value calculations. The results indicated the existence of data governance structures for structured and semi-structured operational data but highlighted the need for governance catering for unstructured big data structures. This also applies to data quality checking procedures. Additional education and training for the various roles responsible for organizational data governance can increase the quality of interoperability of data among entities.