Executive summary

Icatu, Latin America’s largest independent insurer, already had established processes for exchanging critical data with a broad partner network. By implementing Control-M for enterprise workflow orchestration, the company evolved this model through end-to-end automation, making routines that once took hours faster and more efficient. The initiative helped Icatu achieve 99% availability SLAs and strengthen the governance and auditability required in a regulated business. Today, Control-M supports Icatu in expanding its agility, resilience, and reliability, giving customers and partners confidence that their information is accurate, secure, and available when needed.

A partnership-driven business built on trust

Icatu is Latin America’s largest independent insurer, specializing in life insurance, pension plans, and capitalization products. Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro and operating throughout Brazil, the company employs approximately 2,800 people and plays an important role in the country’s financial and regulatory ecosystem.

Icatu’s business is built on partnerships. Every day, the company works with a wide range of partners, each at a different level of technological maturity. Reliable, standardized data exchange is essential—not only for operational efficiency, but also for the trust at the heart of every insurance relationship.

Evolving processes to expand scale and control

At Icatu, orchestration plays a practical business role: keeping services running, documenting operational controls, and helping a broad partner network exchange critical data without disruption.

Before Control-M, Icatu’s data exchange processes were largely manual and decentralized. Operators needed to monitor incoming files, track their arrival, move them between folders, reformat layouts, and route them through the appropriate workflows. This less agile approach depended on manual effort and became increasingly difficult to scale as partner volumes and operational complexity grew.

For a regulated insurer, the challenge extended beyond speed. Icatu serves major companies, particularly in the pension and life insurance segments, and these customers regularly audit the maturity of the company’s controls. Icatu needed to demonstrate that sensitive data was handled with the robustness and traceability required by its partners, customers, and regulators.

Governance and audit visibility created an additional constraint. Icatu could access only the most recent 60 to 90 days of execution history for its operational routines—well short of the full year auditors wanted to review.

As Luiz Felipe Rezende Gonzaga, who leads EDI at Icatu, explained: “The process required direct operator oversight to monitor file arrival and validate receipt.”

Orchestrating critical data exchange with Control-M

Icatu selected Control-M as its enterprise workflow orchestration platform because it combined proven automation capabilities with the scale, reliability, and governance required in a highly regulated financial services environment. The team also valued Control-M’s market leadership. Its consistent recognition as a Leader in the Gartner ^® Magic Quadrant and the trust placed in it by the world’s leading financial institutions made it the clear choice.

“In addition to being a market leader in the category, we place great value on solutions that stand out in the Magic Quadrant,” said Rezende Gonzaga. “We compared Control-M with other solutions on the market, and at the time, it proved to be the best fit.”

With Control-M, Icatu automated the entire file-handling process. As soon as a file arrives, Control-M organizes and restructures it, then routes it through the appropriate workflow without manual intervention. Governance and security are built into the solution, providing the team with centralized, easy-to-access logs that record how each file arrived, how it was sent, and how it was processed.

Renan De Faria Huguenin, Icatu’s IT Superintendent, described the shift in perspective: automation “moved beyond being an operational tool to become a pillar of regulatory stability for the business.”

The outcome: faster operations, stronger governance, and greater reliability

Since implementing Control-M, Icatu has achieved measurable improvements in operational efficiency, service reliability, scalability, and governance:

• From hours to minutes. A critical process that previously took approximately four hours is now completed in minutes through end-to-end automation.
• 99% availability. Icatu consistently meets its 99% availability SLAs, a level of reliability it attributes directly to Control-M.
• Greater audit visibility. The company extended execution-history retention from 60 to 90 days to a full year, meeting auditor requirements without reducing execution performance or increasing operational workload.
• Scale without team expansion. As activity grows year over year, Icatu absorbs the increase with the same team, allowing the platform to support the additional workload instead of expanding headcount.
• Proactive issue detection. Predictive monitoring flags potential bottlenecks before they affect SLAs, enabling the team to identify and resolve issues quickly.
• Fewer production failures. Automating manual steps reduced errors and improved visibility into job dependencies.

Just as important is what happens when no one is watching. “There is a silent execution that takes place mainly overnight, ensuring that our operation remains up and running,” said De Faria Huguenin. This quiet reliability extends to every new partner Icatu onboards, helping each one connect to an established orchestration ecosystem and benefit from it immediately.

For the end customer, the benefit is confidence. “It is the assurance that the information available will be accurate and there when it is needed,” said De Faria Huguenin. In a business where insurance is fundamentally a promise, that reliability makes a difference.

Advancing automation with AI and cloud

For Icatu, Control-M evolved from an automation tool into a foundation for operational stability, regulatory compliance, and business growth. The platform transformed manual, reactive processes into automated, predictive ones, taking automation beyond IT and placing it at the center of how the company delivers reliable services.

Looking ahead, Icatu plans to explore Control-M’s AI capabilities as part of its evolution roadmap, alongside a broader move toward cloud services, with the goal of increasing efficiency, agility, and speed.

Want to discover what enterprise orchestration can do for your business? Explore Control-M or schedule a demo today.