Streamline your financial data management to increase profitability

Insurance companies can’t afford to ignore the significant value and opportunities for growth that data can create. Yet as the amount of internal data within insurance companies is growing exponentially, insurers also face ever-increasing scrutiny from auditors, regulators, and stakeholders on how that data is collected, kept, and analysed. Ensuring the integrity, consistency, transparency, accessibility, and good governance of data has never been more important.

Without a robust, streamlined, and efficient data management strategy, insurers face the risk of failing to fulfil their financial, operational, risk control and reporting obligations. Piers Williams, Sales and Relationship Manager–Insurance at AutoRek, will join a panel of industry experts on September 21, 2021, to debate how to achieve this in our new webinar “ Streamline your financial data management to increase profitability”.

Discover how to:

How can you streamline your financial data management across the business? To answer this question and others, Williams will be joined by Mehul Nathwani, Group Director of Business Change & Innovation at Aspen insurance Group; Dan Fiehn, Former Group Chief Operating Officer at Markerstudy; Edosa Odaro, Head of Data at AIG; and by moderator Jacob Abboud, Managing Partner and Founder at Petraenovus Consulting.

Ahead of the webinar, Williams shared his thoughts with us.

What strategies should be deployed to automate financial reporting processes and improve actuarial reserving?

At the core of any strategy, there must be a technology basis to handle the volumes of data. I have been working with clients with datasets upwards of 500 million transactions. Key to effectively managing this data is technology as it’s the only way to analyse data in an efficient way to ensure accurate financial reporting and that reporting outputs are up to date.

We advise clients that their strategies or processes should be designed to work at the most granular level of detail available in their data. This delivers greater insights and value down the line. We look at data holistically and work with any system in the business architecture for example claims data, premium data, adjustment data, actuarial data, etc. Bringing all of this together delivers valuable insights to help businesses improve their financial forecasting and actuarial reserving processes.

How can insurers simplify complex intersystem reconciliation processes, reduce manual effort, empower business users, and remove dependencies on IT?

In terms of automating complex intersystem reconciliation processes, you need a rules-driven platform. Complexity is often the result of the unique business systems architecture of each specific organisation. Any intersystem reconciliation solution must be flexible and tailored to the specific business challenges, while also reducing the manual work.

When it comes to empowering business users, no-code solutions are key—such as AutoRek. We have found empowering business users works well, and building on the skillset users already have does too. Often financial data management processes run on Excel spreadsheets—users will have developed advanced Excel skills over their career, so AutoRek has been designed to build on this skillset, by following similar logic to that of Excel. As a result, it’s extremely easy for the workforce to learn and use effectively.

It’s key to get business users to buy in to these technology initiatives. We certainly look to move businesses away from the use of Excel, but we look to build on the skillset of employees and create strong and lasting relationships. You often experience pushback to change initiatives from the workforce, but when you get buy-in, you can utilise SME knowledge and experience to ensure the change is a success. This empowers business users and removes IT dependencies.

Why is it important to increase transparency and consistency by standardising large volumes of data?

From experience working with large insurance clients, it often seems as though insurance data is organic—data comes from multiple locations and sources in a variety of formats. The detail or granularity of data varies significantly, so it can be challenging to compare data from ledger, claims and premiums, and there needs to be a consistent baseline from which to work.

AutoRek deploys its intelligent data acquisition features to collate and transform data to ensure a consistent baseline. This helps drive transparency. If all data is standardised, it makes it easier for the whole business to understand and use the data effectively. This also ensures there is transparency as the workforce will understand what data should look like, and more importantly what it shouldn’t look like, and if there might be an issue.

IFRS 17 is a great example of new insurance regulation that aims to drive increased transparency and a consistent framework for insurance accounting processes. This has resulted in many insurers looking at their whole data estate and the financial data management processes they have in place, reviewing the effectiveness and, as is often required, implementing new solutions such as AutoRek.

What should insurance companies do to capitalise on more granular data to write new business and improve profitability?

It’s important to learn from data. To facilitate that learning, it’s essential that the data is accessible to the workforce. Not only accessible—it needs to be digestible and easy to understand. The use of graphical views and charts, and data presentation methods such as the dashboard suite available in AutoRek which is very visual, makes capitalising on data easy. Clients often mention that dashboards offer a huge value-add for them to gain a clearer understanding of their data.

Can this help them to gain a clear view of financial positions by quickly identifying inaccuracies to allow prompt downstream resolution?

Within the management information (MI), metrics, reporting and dashboards, it’s possible to have controls in place to allow a more proactive approach to resolution by making users aware of any issues early. This means resolution processes can start without delay. AutoRek has the ability not only to flag user issues, but also by using intelligent automation features, the potential to suggest and present remediation solutions to business users. This significantly reduces the time required to resolve issues.

What would you like delegates to take away from the webinar?

If you want to unlock the value of your data, and ensure its consistency and accuracy across your business, then there is a solution. If you think your data model is too complex, fragmented, comes in a variety of formats and at different levels of granularity, or with data inconsistencies, come to see us at AutoRek—we hear these challenges daily.

We can provide a tailored solution to automate the most complex data management challenges in insurance.

Piers Williams, Sales and Relationship Manager–insurance at AutoRek, is speaking at our new webinar “ Streamline your financial data management to increase profitability” (September 21, 2021). Register here to learn how to fulfil your financial, operational, risk control and reporting obligations by streamlining financial data management to increase profitability. If you can’t make it on the day, you’ll be sent the recording.