There is little doubting the strategic importance of accurate financial analysis and reporting for insurers. A robust, corporate inclusive financial process delivers three key strategic wins;
- As the insurance industry moves to more sophisticated and innovative sources of capital, accurate measurement of costs and profitability is central to securing that capital at optimum rates.
- Delivering improved corporate ‘shareholder value’ by demonstrating the aggregation of financial data into a single version of the truth that is easily understood by both internal or external observers.
- A significant competitive edge from a collaborative integration of all the steps in the financial reporting process which means that the insurer is able to be more agile in aligning growth opportunities to its corporate strategy.
Successful delivery requires that the finance team be involved in all processes where significant cost is incurred. Indeed, it can be argued that the finance team should be able to track and report on reinsurance contract performance early and throughout the whole of the reinsurance management process. The goal is for the finance team to have confidence they are accessing trusted actionable data.
"81% of CFO’s see identifying areas of new value across the business as their primary responsibility."
Accenture: “Bottom line to Frontline”
The reality frequently falls far short. Ironically for the CFO, there is no shortage of financial data, the challenge is the relevance, provenance, timeliness’ and accuracy of the data for analysis and reporting.
A sizeable source of finance data is related to outwards reinsurance. Whilst arguably the single largest asset to the insurer, premiums and reinsurance recovery data is frequently fragmented and held in multiple systems, with both duplications and gaps in data, and subject to re-keying errors. What should be a single version of the truth process is all too frequently a governance and provenance nightmare, with significant manual intervention required to rationalise the gross to net calculations and resulting data. This is all the more impacting to the insurer as outwards reinsurance data will then impact across all parts of your business.
"30 – 40% of processing time for several key finance processes could be eliminated with effective automation."
PwC: “Finance effectiveness benchmarking”
Cenata SURE is the leading market solution for the processing of all outwards premiums and claims recoveries, through its transparency, simplicity, and data predictability. Cenata SURE addresses all of the traditional issues delivering a full gross to net picture with all data stored, available via Microsoft Power BI for analysis and reporting.
Critically small percentage changes in underwriting performance can translate into $millions lost or saved. Cenata SURE ensures all premium and claim recoveries are maximised from existing reinsurance contracts whilst delivering contract performance analysis, ensuring optimised buying to achieve increased percentage savings.
As a true cloud deployment Cenata SURE can seamlessly integrate with your up and down stream systems, providing data that you can confidently action as that single version of the truth. The data is calculated in real time and as your company grows, Cenata SURE is fully scalable to meet that growth whether organic or acquisitional.
The benefit for the finance team is complete transparency of contract performance. There are no blind spots.
"76% of CFOs agree that without one version of the truth across business units, their organisations will struggle to meet their objectives."
Accenture “From Bottomline to Frontline”
