In an industry facing multiple disruptive forces — including technological, regulatory and competitive pressures — rethinking business and financial systems, and how they interconnect, can help insurers reduce costs, report more quickly and derive more business value from their data.
Historically, system and process evolution in insurance has addressed a small number of needs at a time – often in isolation from other business considerations. The narrow focus of many developments has also been compounded by the fact that most insurers have tackled technical issues in similar ways for many years. Widely used approaches such as modelling product-by-product, for example, are always going to reinforce separation and lead to time-consuming repetition across the financial system as a whole.
Many organizations now recognize that effective finance and process transformation solutions will have to involve some updated thinking: considering more far-reaching change and adopting new methods that will have an impact across the business. Changes that previously would focus on simply ‘faster’ or on ‘better’ will now need to encompass all of ‘faster, better and cheaper’ for the process in question, as well as enabling companies to make better use of information in the business more widely.
Business executives need good quality information of the right type, in a timely fashion, to make effective decisions.
