Why are insurance organizations struggling to modernize their finance and accounting systems?
From reinsurance to life and from property to multi-line, finance managers within the insurance sector are facing numerous challenges in today’s digital economy.
Insurance is an interesting balance-sheet-driven business that requires unique understanding from within the finance team. For example, how can you easily track what’s happening in the instance of policy holders (customers) also being policy claimants (creditors) and when you combine requirements like this with government led initiatives such as MTD (Making Tax Digital) and IFRS regulations — we start to appreciate the unique challenges faced by finance within insurance.
To mitigate risk, you must be able to confidently close the disconnects.
It’s a situation that is becoming increasingly complex, especially as the rest of the business continues to technologically evolve.
The need to integrate critical systems across all your lines of business, gaining access to the vital details you need to make decisions and meet digital regulatory requirements has never been more important and yet traditional approaches to finance and accounting shackle the team to “old” information models which struggle to adapt to the hyper-competitive (and connected) economy.
Integration is vital for such processes as expense management of a global workforce. For example, you should be able to enforce a single expense policy with local variations as required, and ensure tighter management of employee spending, so even when you expand or acquire new business units, you can easily integrate them “into the fold.” of business topics, risk, cover, accounting for risk.
It’s a situation that is becoming increasingly complex, especially as the rest of the business continues to technologically evolve.
Extend the value of finance in insurance.
If you are following an acquisition-led growth strategy, savings are often made by combining shared services such as purchasing, accounting and IT to deliver economies of scale. In most cases the head count for the accounting function is kept to a minimum requiring them to handle a much greater workload to deliver cost savings.
Choosing the right accounting system to support this growth is critical to enable the cost savings that shared services deliver. Here is how Aqilla can help:
- Effective financial controls in place, with a particular focus on compliance
In such a highly regulated industry, security and auditability are paramount and an audit facility that enables the recording of activities against any aspect of the system, by any user, is essential. - Ability to manage P&L, Balance Sheet and variance analysis
Controlling costs across disparate systems can be extremely difficult, often requiring inefficient manual processes. A cloud-based infrastructure enables the use of workflows to control costs across the entire business. Aqilla’s multi-company capabilities offer a flexible approach to bringing together and accounting for new syndicates and companies into a single unified structure. Rules, behaviours and workflows can shared automatically or adapted to circumstance - Seamlessly prepare and submit VAT returns
Gone are the days of waiting months (if not years) to see a new product release, monolithic software development approaches don’t have the agility to support a mobile, disparate workforce. The “Making Tax Digital” initiative from HMRC is a perfect example of the continually changing approach organisations have to doing business. - Quickly complete month end procedures
The use of combined or unified ledger ensures all transactions are balanced at point of entry without the need for control accounts, removing the need for lengthy period/year end reconciliation. - Touch of the button preparation of monthly cost of sales calculations
Aqilla’s modern architecture allows the use of custom fields to capture more information and provide more detailed reporting and analysis. You can easily create pivot reports that show analysis by policy, group, syndicate, insurance product group, location, department etc. - Provision of other key financial information to support growth
In a fast changing insurance and reinsurance marketplace or If you are following an acquisition-led growth strategy, savings are often made by combining shared services such as risk management, underwriting, accounting and IT to deliver economies of scale. When integrating new companies within a group structure migrating data from legacy systems into the core accounting software needs to be fast and reliable. New companies can be created quickly within Aqila and existing companies can be used as templates to enable rapid deployment. If the acquired company has a different business model this can easily be accommodated within the multi-company environment - Longevity (have you switched to Cloud?)
One of the most challenging and important aspects of growth is the ability see a single all encompassing view of the business’s performance, through consolidated on-demand management accounts that are error free and available instantly at the end of each period, be that based upon calendar, financial, policy or a risk event. By adopting a cloud strategy for financial reporting and accounting you benefit from a scalable platform that requires none of the infrastructure planning and costs that an on-premise solution requires. The on-demand nature of cloud means you can focus on your core activities driving customer value without worrying about any of the aspects of meeting the needs of stakeholders.
Choosing the right accounting system to support this growth is critical to enable the cost savings that shared services deliver.
Mitigate risk and adapt with confidence with Aqilla
With Aqilla any user can access the software using a relatively low spec device as long as it is running a modern web browser. There is no client install required and so it can be used on desktops or mobile devices from any location with a good internet connection.
New users can be deployed within minutes and scaled up or down in line with the business requirements.
Our subscription model is flexible with only 30 days notice required for any changes and all licences include software support. Maintenance updates are provided approximately every 6–8 weeks and the cost is include in the subscription fee.
Aqila are experts in data migration from legacy systems with tools that enable us to bring data across in double quick time. There are no limits on how much of your legacy data you can migrate so you can keep your transaction histories without having to compromise.
We offer a full purchase to payment solution as well as integrated expense management that can be geographically dispersed whilst maintaining tight control with the use of value based workflows.
Lots more information obviously can be found at www.aqilla.com.
