Case Study: Northwestern Mutual achieves modernized, scalable data management with Databricks

Driving Transformation at Northwestern Mutual (Insights Platform) by Moving Towards a Scalable, Open Lakehouse Architecture

Northwestern Mutual, a 160+ year-old financial services company with millions of clients and a large, legacy data footprint, needed a better way to manage growing data volumes, reduce silos, and improve real-time access for business decision-making. Its existing MSBI-based environment struggled with scalability, data latency, security, and long delivery cycles, and the company partnered with Databricks to modernize its data ingestion and analytics foundation.

Databricks helped Northwestern Mutual move to an open lakehouse architecture using Databricks Delta Lake and Spark, with custom frameworks for ingestion, scheduling, and schema management. The new platform added ACID transactions, governance, role-based security, and scalable processing, cutting daily load time from 7 hours to 2 hours and reducing time to market for changes from 4–6 weeks to 1–2 weeks.

Northwestern Mutual

Madhu Kotian

Vice President of Engineering (Investment Products Data, CRM, Apps and Reporting