Age UK

About the company

Age UK was formed on 25 February 2009 from the merger of Help the Aged and Age Concern, creating UK’s largest charity for older people organisation. Age UK has a combined income of around £160 million, including £47 million a year raised through fundraising, and over 520 charity shops, and income raised through its commercial services arm, Age UK Enterprises

Age UK Enterprises offers products and services that are designed to either address market failure and/or meet its objective of offering products that provide value for money – for example, none of its insurance products have upper age limits.

Operating as a social enterprise, Age UK Enterprises’ product range currently includes: Travel, Home and Motor Insurance (provided by Ageas Insurance Limited); Motor Breakdown cover (provided by Aria Assistance Limited); Gas and Electricity (provided by EOn Energy Solutions), Funeral Plan (provided by Dignity Funeral Plans), Annuities Service, Equity Release, Wills and Legal Services, Holidays, Lifebook and Personal Alarms.

Challenges

The prime challenge Age UK faced was producing the regulatory reporting. This involved complex processing of large amounts of data from disparate sources and reporting it in the Statement Of Financial Activity (SOFA). Combined with manual intervention, this made for a situation where a great deal of highly qualified resource was being used for menial compilation work.

Additionally the result of merging 2 charities including 2 sets of systems and data, there was duplication and redundant systems containing historic data required for various management purposes.

The Result

With the Control Solution’s vast amount of pre-defined yet flexible content, rapid develop and deploy toolset, the solution was able to quickly automate the processing of the data for the SOFA. This reduced the efforts from months to days, including testing and moving to production status.

Utilising the powerful ETL (Extract Transform Load) platform, a large disparate array of data can now be processed very quickly and stored in a high availability structure within the Data Warehousing. In turn this allows Control Solution reporting layer to instantly provide the SOFA data to relevant consumers.