CASE STUDIES
How Nationwide Automates Enterprise Data Quality at Scale
January 30, 2025
Key Results
3,000+
Anomalo has found more data quality problems with its out-of-the-box, turnkey solution than Nationwide’s 3,000 rules.
100
of 5,000 databases fall into the top tier. Out-of-box data observability can be applied to all databases and then leverage deep data quality monitoring across the most important data assets.
About Nationwide
Over the past 90 years, focusing on customers and valuing people have helped Nationwide become one of the largest insurance and financial services companies in the world.
Tech Stack
Data Warehouse:Â Â 
Data Catalog:Â Â Â 
Size
10,000+ Employees
Industry
Insurance
The Challenge
Complex Data Assembly Lines, Brittle Manual Rules
Nationwide handles critical financial data at a enterprise scale. Their data estate clocks in at over 13,000 databases across the enterprise, about 5,000 in production. Data at Nationwide flows through many complex transformations before being used for analytics and compliance. “You can think of it as the assembly line for a car,” said Mike Randall, Director of Enterprise Data Governance at Nationwide.
Mike has been working in data quality at Nationwide for over 30 years. “I started out looking at BIN numbers to make sure they were keyed in correctly. I had a terminal in front of me, I had policies in front of me, I had books.” Before Anomalo, Nationwide’s marketing team alone had 3,000+ custom business rules to maintain. The result was that data quality was mostly “reactive,” Mike said. Issues might not be detected until the final output went to a report or regulator.
The Solution
Anomalo’s AI-Powered Monitoring + Databricks and Alation Integrations
The enterprise data office evaluated several different solutions for data quality, but what stood out was Anomalo’s AI-powered monitoring. It learns which data changes represent normal
fluctuations, and which are true deviations worth investigating. “I put my name behind the Anomalo selection because Anomalo was the one bringing statistical analysis to the field,” Mike said.
Crucially, Anomalo also had deep partnerships and integrations with Databricks, Databricks Unity Catalog, and Alation, all key parts of Nationwide’s infrastructure.
The Results
“The Best Day of My Life in Data Governance”
“When we first brought Anomalo in, we put it on our most important analytics databases, and within that the most important table,” Mike said. “We had a really quick standup —within months we were up and running. It was probably the fastest I’ve ever seen anything at Nationwide move, in my 31 years.”
Since implementing Anomalo, Nationwide has been able to find and stop issues at the source, before they affect downstream reports and analytics. “We have some really good examples where Anomalo has detected a problem, it saved us from sending a bad report to regulators because of some business data, and we’ve been able to kick jobs off to fix the problem,” Mike said. Now that the right tools are in place, it’s much easier for everyone to work together and implement best practices.
“We have a Data Risk community at Nationwide, and they’ve created a policy: for our most important assets, you have to have it cataloged in Alation and you have to have data quality with Anomalo. That was the best day of my life in data governance, when they came up with that standard and policy.”
Mike Randall
Director of Enterprise Data Governance
Unlock the full case study to see how Anomalo was able to find more data quality problems with its turnkey solution as well as Nationwide’s advice for data teams
