From mainframe cleanup to mission-critical system: How iA Financial Group built one trusted view of its clients

iA Financial Group used Ataccama ONE MDM to unify client records scattered across decades of acquisitions into a single golden record. What started as an IT project to retire part of a legacy mainframe is now a mission-critical system behind iA’s federated client portal and the client intelligence driving its 2030 growth plan.

Industry	Insurance and wealth management
Location	United States and Canada
Clients	11.9 million across North America
Solution	Ataccama ONE MDM, Data Quality & Catalog (DQ&C), Reference Data Management (RDM)
Key result	MDM classified as a critical enterprise system, running 24/7 under a 99.9% availability SLA

Key takeaways

• iA mastered client records from every line of business into one golden record, giving the company a centralized Customer 360 view it could not build before.
• The MDM solution processes more than 100,000 data events every day, in real time and in batch, with matching and standardization fully automated.
• iA’s enterprise architecture team classified Ataccama MDM as a critical system. It now runs around the clock behind client-facing operations such as portal logins and self-service use cases.
• Golden records flow back into the lines of business, so a client who updates an address with one sector no longer has to repeat it with the others. Those golden records feed iA’s semantic layer and AI models, which support cross-selling initiatives that have delivered incremental revenue.
• iA is now moving mainframe reference data to Ataccama RDM and plans to open its Data Trust Hub to the entire group in 2027.

About iA Financial Group

iA Financial Group is one of the largest insurance and wealth management groups in North America. It serves nearly 12 million clients in Canada and the United States across individual insurance and savings, group benefits, auto and home insurance, dealer services, and wealth management.

The company has been in business for more than 100 years and has grown through multiple acquisitions. For much of that history, acquired businesses kept their own systems. Over time, that left iA with what Chantale Boulanger, Senior Director of IT Delivery for Dealer Services, describes as a scattered data ecosystem.

The challenge: One client, many versions

Every sector at iA ran its own mix of legacy, cloud, and homegrown systems, each holding its own version of the client. A person with a life insurance policy in one division and auto and home coverage in another existed as separate records in separate databases. iA had five customer portals across five organizational units, so that same client could also need several logins.

With no universal identifier shared across systems, the only way to connect those records was by matching attributes that change over time, such as name, address, phone number, and email. The practical consequences reached across the business:

• No reliable client count: iA could not tell how many clients it had across the group or which products each one held.
• Obscured growth opportunities: A client with life insurance but no home and auto policy was invisible as a cross-sell opportunity, and advisors lacked a view of the full relationship.
• Repeated effort for clients: An address change given to one line of business did not reach the others, so clients had to contact several help desks to update the same detail.
• A new integration project every time: Each line of business brought a different system with its own standards, keys, and mandatory fields, which slowed the team as it expanded.

The MDM program itself began with a narrower goal: decommissioning part of iA’s legacy mainframe. As the team took a deeper dive into its client base, the focus moved to a business question. If iA could see every product each client held, it could grow organically within its existing client base.

Why iA chose Ataccama

iA needed a platform that could take in client data from a dozen source systems of very different ages. Some sent event-based messages; others delivered nightly batches. Each used different keys, collected different fields, and treated different information as mandatory. The platform had to standardize all of it against shared definitions of what a client and an address mean at iA, then govern those definitions in one place.

iA evaluated several vendors. For Boulanger, the deciding factor was the relationship Ataccama offered alongside the technology, given how ambitious their program was.

The solution: A golden record built for daily operations

iA built one of the more complex MDM implementations in Ataccama’s customer base. The model spans a high count of master entity types and hundreds of relationship types, fed by tens of source entity types, many of them streamed in real time through Kafka. Every entity in the group is now integrated and mastered in the golden record.

Data arrives in batch or near real time. The MDM solution standardizes and matches it automatically, then publishes updates to consuming systems in real time. Each consumer decides whether to ingest changes automatically or route them through a manual step, for example when an identity check is required. The platform answers thousands of REST API calls from downstream systems every day.

Measuring trust in every attribute

Because source systems apply very different data quality practices, iA invested into building a data quality index for each attribute of the golden record using the Ataccama ONE platform data quality capabilities. The index answers questions such as how far iA can rely on the phone numbers and addresses it holds for each client. The iA team built data trust dashboards on top of it that track quality at each stage, from the source systems through cleansing to the golden record. Today, 25 monitoring projects run weekly across the lines of business.

From analytics to operations

The first use of the golden record was an analytical one. For the first time, iA could report on group-wide KPIs such as total client numbers and retention rates, metrics that reach senior management. That success brought the operational use cases, and with them, a new level of responsibility for the platform.

The results: From data project to mission-critical system

A Customer 360 behind iA’s growth plan

The golden record is now iA’s source of truth for its clients. It shows when a client of one sector is the same person as a client of another, and which of the group’s products that person does not yet hold.

That client knowledge supports iA’s 2030 plan, which aims to double the company’s net revenue by the end of the decade. Boulanger describes the Customer 360 as the backbone of the organic growth the plan depends on.

Critical infrastructure, available around the clock

iA’s enterprise architecture team has classified Ataccama MDM as a critical enterprise system. The platform sits at the center of the organization, and the golden record is the source of truth that every line of business draws from.

The golden record also underpins iA’s work to bring its five customer portals together into one federated client space. Systems that build a client’s space read MDM updates in real time, so a new client can access their information as soon as they finish signing paperwork with their advisor.

Boulanger anticipated this years ago. At her first Ataccama Customer Advisory Board, she discussed the need for a 99.9% availability SLA with Martin Zahumensky, now Ataccama’s CEO, who challenged her on how critical the system would become. Ataccama delivered on the 99.9% a couple of years ago, as the two had agreed.

A foundation for AI

The MDM feeds iA’s semantic layer for the corporate group and for each line of business. Each sector sees its own golden records alongside anonymized data about its clients’ relationships with other sectors, and can add its own operational data to build a sector-specific 360 view on the same foundation.

iA’s client data and insight platform combines MDM data with transactional data. On that base, the team has built life event detection and client lifetime value models alongside next best action use cases, and the cross-selling initiatives they support have brought incremental revenue.

Looking ahead: Retiring the mainframe and opening a Data Trust Hub with Ataccama

Moving reference data to Ataccama RDM

iA’s legacy IBM mainframe still holds reference data used by more than 50 downstream systems. The tables are expensive to maintain and sit outside any governed process, to the point where it can be hard to tell who is using them. In 2026, iA began replacing that mainframe reference data with Ataccama RDM, an initiative separate from its client MDM program.

The use cases range from simple to complex. A table of countries should follow an ISO standard rather than values someone entered by hand. Interest rates change often and are costly to update on the mainframe. In RDM, data stewards can update those values as often as needed, with data owners approving each change.

One governed platform for the whole group

The success of the client golden record has drawn interest from other parts of the business. iA now plans to extend data quality monitoring to other domains, such as dealer and product data, and to use RDM so that common values like dates and postal codes follow the same format across every transformation program. Mikedis calls this vision the Ataccama Data Trust Hub: MDM, data quality, and RDM offered as one governed platform across iA’s lines of business.