Management and regulatory demands were increasingly compressing the timelines associated with a global multinational insurer’s reserving process. While the core reserving work was well informed and well organized, the team managing the full end-to-end process was stretched to capacity. Furthermore, the exchange of data between its analytical and actuarial teams, both before and after analysis, made the process susceptible to delays and errors.
Consequently, the company wanted to transform its reserving process to reduce the burden on its team, while improving efficiency and insights and strengthening auditability and governance.
The client deployed Unify in its existing reserving environment, with WTW and the insurer working collaboratively to deliver a comprehensive solution to a complex business problem. Our input included training and project management alongside actuarial, IT and process automation expertise.
This collaborative approach ensured that at the end of the implementation, the client fully owned the solution and could implement it independently of WTW as part of business as usual - something that was very important to them.
The solution has delivered improvements in all targeted areas - efficiency, insight, auditability and governance.
Automation is central to that, delivering benefits such as:
- Increased insights through new automated diagnostics and management information.
- Automated control of the ResQ reserving package, including initiating roll-forwards, updating security settings, creating backups and performing data loads.
- By linking multiple series of automated processes (including SAS) together, Unify significantly reduced the amount of manual intervention and time required to complete the work involved.
- The integration of DataValidator to both increase the number of reconciliations and validations and to fully automate those checks, increasing governance, reducing errors and provided red flag diagnostics sooner.
- Automated creation of back-ups at key project milestones and system-generated notifications and reconciliation check points.
- The new process is also significantly more transparent and sustainable for burgeoning regulatory and reporting needs. It is able to record key assumptions, inputs and reports which are then governed, versioned and retained by Unify for full auditability and results visualization in Power BI. It also leverages Outlook so that key stakeholders are informed at critical moments in the process.
- Intuitive management dashboards reduce the time spent explaining results to senior management.
- Increased validations and strong governance significantly reduce time spent with auditors.
- The solution empowered the actuarial department to deliver on a transformative initiative, demonstrating its commitment to innovation and continuous improvement to senior management.
- The new technology and process reduces time spent on data processing and set up, thereby increasing capacity for more in-depth analysis.
- Strengthened governance and error detection.
- Improved process oversight.
- More insights into trends.
- More transparency around key assumptions.
- Enhanced documentation.
- Improved communication of results and reporting.
In short, more time is now spent on enhancing the value of the reserving process to the business rather than figuring out how to complete reserving work accurately and with clarity for a range of audiences in the time available.
