Insurance CFOs Thrive with the Right Advanced Analytics Solution

For insurance companies, maintaining and monitoring the health of your business is a delicate yet demanding balancing act. Your organization depends on its ability to sell services to customers. But you need to constantly supervise the health of those accounts and offset risks of overexposure. You also have to monitor your assets and investments to ensure no liabilities outweigh our costs.

Just as importantly, you need to compile these details into reports to regulators to demonstrate the health of your business. Fall out of step with these demands and you risk financial exposure, embarrassing fines, and potential damage to your company’s reputation.

To keep pace, you and your actuarial team rely on manual accounting processes to analyze your business and secure compliance. But gathering data from multiple sources to compile these insights is a complex, time-consuming, and costly undertaking.

However, what if you could access an automated solution to monitor the health of your finances in a way that satisfies your regulatory requirements and your executive leadership? With modern analytics, you generate these insights in a way that ensures your insurance company performs at a high level.

How a Customized Analytics Solution Offers Crucial Insights for Insurance Companies

In the insurance industry, CFOs and the chief actuary are the backbone of every business. As your organization navigates its day-to-day functions, your CFO is regularly confirming the health of your company by analyzing the accounting behind each investment. The actuarial team applies details from your customer data to offset any potential risk and ensure the financial resilience of the company.

To remain compliant — and to satisfy your leadership team — you need to develop the full picture of your customer portfolio. For example, mortgage companies need to understand high-risk customers who may not be in the position to pay their mortgage. Then, the actuarial team calculates the risk of default. At the same time, you need to stress-test your financial forecasts and ensure your organization is positioned for success.

Understand Your Financial Risk Factors Through Automated Reporting

At Zencos, we’ve developed a solution that provides enhanced oversight to ensure your assets are positioned to meet future liabilities. The software looks at your company’s investments and reviews them in the context of micro and macroeconomic factors, including:

• Interest rate risk: Current or future earnings that are exposed to adverse changes in the market.
• Liquidity risk: Ensuring your company has enough cash to cover its debts.
• Market risk: Potential exposure as a result of variabilities in stock prices, exchange rates, or commodities.

With modern software analytics, you monitor the health of your organization’s loans, investments, and overall financial position. Plus, along with providing insights out-of-the-box, the solution offers our custom predictive models to help you generate reports to better understand the risk factors impacting your business.

Advanced Analytics Simplifies Regulatory Requirements for Insurers

The right analytics solution doesn’t just offer greater visibility into the health of your business to aid your organization’s financial planning. It also tailors the company’s reporting in a way that allows CFOs to file needed reports to remain in good regulatory standing.

In the U.S. and Canada, insurers and financial institutions need to satisfy differing requirements. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) provides regulatory oversight in the U.S., and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) in Canada.

In our recent work with a Canadian mortgage insurer, we customized the analytics solution to meet strict regulatory demands. In Canada, mortgage insurers must fulfill additional requirements, including the Mortgage Insurer and Capital Adequacy Test (MICAT) and IFRS 17. These mandates ensure insurance companies meet current standards with their accounting technology and data models.

From an auditing standpoint, regulators want to understand not only the statistical models an insurer is using. They also need to verify the data sources each company uses to ensure revenue forecasts are accurate. Often, regulators must audit 1,500-page reports.

Companies face steep penalties for not satisfying these regulatory demands. The risk of incurring a costly fine for failing to satisfy regulatory standards is one insurers cannot afford.

Faster Decision-Making at Lower Costs

For many insurers, CFOs face an uphill climb to keep up with the regulatory and financial requirements facing their business. Plus, if your company hasn’t begun a modernization initiative, your team may still be compiling these details manually from multiple data sources using Excel.

When you work with the right IT partner, you gain an automated solution that brings all your business information together. Our advanced analytics capability enables you to have more meaningful conversations about your financial health and make better decisions moving forward.

Most importantly, you gain these vital insights at a far lower cost. For our mortgage insurance client, we executed several Proof of Concept (POC) examples to demonstrate the possibilities of applying modern analytics to their reporting needs. Our POCs provided insights that were 10x more illustrative of the company’s financial risk outcomes than their conventional methods. Just as importantly, our solution’s work to compile the data and run the needed analytics processes was 1000x faster.

Over the years, the company stands to save millions of dollars in work hours alone. With the right technology, you can invest the funds your team spends on compiling data back into your business.

Modern Analytics Provides Internal and External Benefits to Insurance Companies

Along with generating complex reports to secure regulatory compliance, you need to understand the ins and outs of their customers and investments to secure a stable future for your company.

Moving forward, insurance CFOs face a growing need to identify the factors threatening to impact the viability of your business. For example, with climate change and its related disasters a mounting concern, your company risks increased exposure by having too many clients in geographic areas prone to seasonal fires or flooding. 

With the help of an experienced IT partner, your analytics solution can illustrate the conditions facing your customers and the possibility of their policies being impacted by natural disasters. Then, you and your actuarial team can make informed strategic decions about the customers you take on in the future.

Insurance CFOs thrive by gaining a clearer understanding of their business data. The right analytics solution generates stability and security in an uncertain future. If this sounds like a solution that will bring your organization closer to its goals, we should talk.