How Beneva Actuaries Scaled High-Performance Dev with Posit & Snowflake

Summary

Beneva replaced a fragile patchwork of Excel files and VBA macros with a modern analytics platform built on Posit Team and Snowflake. Live connections to Snowflake eliminated the export-to-Excel cycle entirely, giving teams real-time access to clean, governed data that feeds directly into their Posit built tools. The platform has transformed how actuaries work at a fundamental level, empowering up to 100 data scientists and actuaries to independently build and deploy production-ready solutions.

COMPANY:

Beneva — Canada's largest insurance mutual

TEAM:

Claims Analytics & P&C Rating Solution

Technology used:

Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Posit Package Manager

Data cloud partner integration:

Snowflake

The challenge

A Fragile Foundation in a Fast-Moving Market

Property and casualty insurance is a data-intensive business where risk profiles shift constantly. For Beneva's actuaries and analytics teams, staying ahead of that pace required fast, flexible access to data, something their existing setup couldn't reliably provide. A series of mergers and system migrations had left the organization with data scattered across sources that didn't talk to each other, and no clean way to bring it together.

Day-to-day analysis ran on a patchwork of Excel files, VBA macros, and SAS programs, stored on a shared network drive and run from local laptops. There was no version control. Visibility into scheduled jobs was low, with no easy alerting when something broke. Every time a file changed, someone had to manually make sure every colleague had the latest version. Users were trained, above all, not to accidentally break the templates.

The audit team's situation illustrated how these constraints played out in practice. For years, they looked for a purpose-built solution. Vendors quoted multi-million dollar price tags. In-house IT explored alternatives, including a Jira-based audit tool. Multiple rounds of evaluation with other Beneva teams produced nothing that fit. Eventually, the team built their own solution using the tools and knowledge they had: Excel and VBA. It worked, up to a point.

Keeping that homegrown system current required a daily manual import. Each time an auditor saved a form, a VBA macro generated a new CSV file, and those files had to be gathered and loaded by hand, every single day, by a single person. Extracting fresh results meant waiting up to 24 hours for the next data refresh, and if an auditor corrected a previously completed form, they waited another full day to see it reflected in the report. The underlying file tree lived on a shared network drive, which made the whole system acutely vulnerable. Auditors needed read and write access to the folder containing every CSV result file, which meant a few careless clicks could erase an entire day's work.

The audit team's experience wasn't an edge case. It was a signal that the organization had reached the limits of what its existing tools could support.

The solution

Built for Speed, Designed for Trust

Beneva's analytics teams set out to build a new environment designed to remove friction and get analysts to insights faster.

Using Posit Team and Snowflake, they designed and built an environment pre-configured so that any user added to the right security group is immediately ready to work with Snowflake data lakes (including Guidewire and Genesis) the moment they log in. No manual Excel exports, aggregation steps, or data-quality hand-offs. Secure connections to data are handled using Posit Snowflake integration managed credentials. An ecosystem of internal R packages acts as the logical backbone to consume and transform data for downstream operations.

To handle validation and logic checks in real time, their team built interactive apps with Shiny deployed on Posit Connect, and linked directly to the Snowflake data warehouse. Automation is another big component of the solution for data transformation pipelines and reporting. Using the notification feature of Connect, the latest report link is sent to interested parties instead of attaching files to a distribution list.

Pipeline changes move through GitHub-backed pull requests with automated testing via GitHub Actions. What once required JIRA tickets, priority queues, and months of waiting now happens multiple times a day. Posit Connect picks up changes and updates the pipeline automatically using github backed deployments.

"It breaks paradigms. It breaks barriers. It puts power back in the hands of employees to bring ideas, to bring innovation."

Bruno Tremblay

Beneva

The results

A Cultural Shift at Scale

A single developer can now ideate, build, test, and securely deploy using AI assistance, GitHub, inherited rights, and simplified access patterns. What once required JIRA tickets, data-team approvals, priority queues, and months of lead time now happens multiple times per day. The Kamino app, an internal claim file auditing tool, went from ideation in March to full production by May, delivered in three months instead of years.

Further, what makes Kamino different from the vendor solutions the team had evaluated for years is that it wasn't built for a generic use case. Auditors and reviewers don't have to adapt to a third-party tool that partially fits their needs. When auditors need a new feature, Beneva's team can have it in production within days, without negotiating a roadmap with a vendor. The app was built to evolve alongside Beneva's control and risk management environment, and the Posit and Snowflake infrastructure is what makes that possible.

That flexibility is visible in how the monthly audit process now runs. Using Posit Connect and Snowflake, Beneva automated the entire cycle of claim file sampling and audit task assignment. Claim inventories for each review type are defined as views in Snowflake, built directly on top of Beneva's data lakes. Each month, Posit Connect automatically runs Quarto documents that connect to Snowflake, retrieve the available claim files, sample a subset based on defined parameters, and import the required information into the Kamino application database, which also lives in Snowflake. When reviewers complete a task, Kamino writes the result back to that database immediately, making the data available for reporting without any manual hand-off.

Posit Team has enabled 50 to 100 data people across actuarial and analytics teams, giving each the ability to prioritize and publish their own specialized tools independently. Demand keeps growing as more groups ask to replicate the approach, especially as data governance requirements tighten and local machine access is further locked down. Kamino is one example of what that looks like in practice. As Simon LaFlamme puts it, "All I need is a vision. I know we have to tools to make it happen.The Kamino app is only one of many example of how Posit and Snowflake allow us to develop custom-made solutions that have a real impact on our efficiency."

The more durable change is cultural. Standardized business logic, shared sandboxes, automated testing, and real-time visibility into changes have transformed how the teams work. In Beneva's annual user satisfaction survey, Posit consistently ranks as the tool people are happiest with. Perhaps the best measure of success came from the auditors themselves. Before the new system, the review process was something to endure. Now, as Bruno Tremblay puts it: "People actually like to do reviews now."

Looking ahead

Idea-Based Development

Beneva isn't finished. The team is now moving toward what Bruno describes as an "assistant-first development culture” and are introducing Positron, paired with Positron Assistant and internal prompts derived from existing business logic packages, to accelerate the transition.

The team also plans to expand Posit Connect use to cover more automation use cases, avoiding more complex cloud setups (Terraform, Dockerfiles, distro dependencies, missing libraries), letting business teams further focus on value instead of infrastructure.

As Bruno puts it: "Posit reduces the friction between you and what you're trying to do." The result is a team of actuaries who have expanded their role from consumers of tools to confident builders of production-ready solutions—and a culture where the next idea is never more than a few hours from reality.
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