Introduction
Legal & General (L&G) is one of the UK’s best-known financial services groups, serving customers across insurance, retirement, investment, and related services. As demand for trusted, standardized data grew across the business, L&G set out to modernize a fragmented data estate, speed up delivery, reduce reliance on manual ETL, and build a more flexible foundation for analytics across multiple platforms.
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- Fragmented landscape: Different data and architecture teams used outdated tools and inconsistent methods, limiting reliability, traceability and reuse.
- Slow delivery cycles: Requirement analysis, business buy-in, design, and development were taking too long as demand for data kept rising.
- Backlog pressure: The team created around 600 reports, but the existing infrastructure could not keep up, so external resources were needed.
- No historical visibility: The marketing database was refreshed weekly through SAS ETL on DB2, overwriting prior states and limiting historical analysis.
- Manual governance: Documentation, release traceability, and skills transfer were manual, error-prone, and too dependent on tribal knowledge.
- Rigid infrastructure: L&G needed a way to modernize without locking every team into one database or one long-term platform choice.
Why WhereScape?
L&G wanted a standardized, automated framework that could bring its various data science and data management activities under one umbrella. WhereScape was a strong fit because it combined automation, platform flexibility, automated documentation, and faster ELT delivery. It also gave L&G the option to support teams working across DB2, Exasol, SQL Server, and Snowflake rather than forcing a one-platform strategy too early.
The Solution
Standardized Data Framework
L&G set out to create a consistent, standardized framework with automation at its core. The goal was to improve collaboration, transparency, trust, and reuse across teams while reducing reliance on individual skillsets and undocumented delivery patterns.
Automated ELT Delivery
WhereScape RED helped L&G move away from older, hand-built ETL approaches and toward automated ELT. That meant faster loading, quicker scheduling, and a more repeatable delivery model for warehouse development and refreshes.
Platform Flexibility
L&G wanted to give teams the freedom to use the database platform that fit their workload best. Some teams stayed on DB2, while others could move toward Exasol or Snowflake, with the option to migrate architectures later rather than being locked in from day one.
Faster Modeling and Prototyping
With WhereScape 3D, teams could scope and prototype data models for business approval before spending days or weeks building frameworks. That reduced wasted effort and improved alignment with business needs earlier in the process.
Automated Documentation and Lineage
WhereScape introduced end-to-end automated documentation plus forward and backward lineage. This gave L&G much stronger visibility into how data moved from source to target and made governance much easier to manage.
“I did a lot of research before buying WhereScape and looked at tools like SnapLogic, Informatica and Talend. The thing that sold me on WhereScape was the automated documentation element. I was really, really impressed with that. I knew WhereScape was going to be a lot quicker than SAS because it was purely ELT. I also like the templates. I like that you can pick a database and regenerate the code for that database if you want to switch.”
– Steve Slade, Development Manager, Legal & General
Results
🚀 Faster Data Delivery
- Mainframe-to-target loads dropped from around 3.5 hours to roughly 1 hour.
- The marketing database build fell from a full week to just 8 hours.
- Loads became more reliable, with far fewer failures and more data moved per run.
🚀 Higher Team Productivity
- Around 20 data engineers now use WhereScape across several lines of business.
- Teams can scope and prototype in 3D instead of spending days or weeks building first.
- Automation gave the effect of a much larger team without adding the same headcount.
🚀 Better Governance and Visibility
- L&G gained forward and backward lineage that it did not have before.
- Source-to-target processes are now documented automatically.
- Standard patterns improved consistency, traceability, and knowledge transfer.
🚀 Stronger Business Trust
- Faster turnaround meant teams could take on more work from the business.
- Reduced backlog helped L&G move faster on long-term data goals.
- Better delivery and transparency increased trust in IT and data teams.
“The main advantage of WhereScape is that the load of data into our target database is around five times quicker. Loading from a mainframe database took around three and a half hours before and had lots of failures. Now we use Federation through WhereScape which takes an hour, but we’re not getting any failures and we’re loading a lot more data as well. The marketing database build that took a full week now takes eight hours, which is just incredible.”
– Steve Slade, Development Manager, Legal & General
Why Timing Mattered
The modernization push came at the right moment. In 2019, L&G sold its General Insurance business division and needed to move away from a shared SQL Server SSIS infrastructure. That created the ideal opportunity to rethink how data pipelines, warehouse delivery and governance should work going forward.
At the same time, the company wanted to reduce the cost and complexity of multiple SAS ETL licenses, enable historical analysis across divisions, and cut the time to value for new data requirements. WhereScape helped turn that moment of change into a wider modernization program.
A Proof of Concept That Landed
WhereScape was invited to run a four-day proof of concept using L&G’s own data. The aim was to show how automated, templated ELT could outperform manual ETL processes in both speed and flexibility.
The result was compelling. Most of the work expected to take three days was completed on day one. The proof of concept was also run on Snowflake, which showed not only raw speed, but also WhereScape’s ability to support migration and platform flexibility in a practical way.
From Support Burden to Real Delivery
Before automation, the weekly refresh cycle created a heavy support burden. If something failed, the knock-on effect was downtime for both ETL and end users, and weekends could be lost to recovery work.
With WhereScape, the environment became far less hands-on. That allowed the team to spend more time on the work that actually mattered, namely delivering new value to the business rather than constantly nursing fragile processes.
“It’s like having five people with only really two people working on it.”
– Will Mealing, Head of Data & Analytics, Legal & General
A Change in Mindset
The technical gains were significant, but the wider impact was cultural as well. L&G did not just speed up data loading. It changed how teams thought about data development, standardization, and reuse.
Instead of siloed methods and one-off approaches, a more holistic data automation strategy began to connect different data science groups across the organization. Teams already using WhereScape were asked to demonstrate it to others, creating internal momentum and a real cross-pollination effect.
“WhereScape has really opened our eyes. We were limited on what we could do before but now we can deliver what the customer really wants rather than having to compromise because of the limitations of our tools.”
– Steve Slade, Development Manager, Legal & General
Room to Grow
L&G’s enterprise license made it possible to scale usage across the business, with unlimited users on WhereScape 3D and RED. That mattered because success in one group quickly led to interest elsewhere. Divisions such as Group Finance began exploring the same combination of WhereScape and Snowflake after seeing the results other teams were already achieving.
WhereScape also gave L&G more freedom in how it evolved its architecture. Rather than being trapped by the limitations of older tools, the team gained templates, metadata, automation, and the option to regenerate code for different database platforms when needed.
“WhereScape provides a solid foundation and rich metadata that can be extrapolated to other aspects of the business,” said Will. “It’s hard to gauge the complete cost-effectiveness of WhereScape considering how widely it has flourished within the company.”
– Will Mealing, Head of Data & Analytics, Legal & General
Success Criteria
The original success criteria for the project were clear and practical:
- Design and develop a data warehouse in under three days.
- Source data from files extracted from DB2.
- Fully document the solution end to end.
Those criteria reflected exactly what L&G needed most: speed, standardization, and documentation. WhereScape helped deliver on all three while also creating a broader foundation for future modernization.
