Leading Thai life insurer transformed its financial reporting process using WTW’s technology

The challenge

A listed life insurer in Thailand was looking for support in making changes to its existing insurance liability valuation and financial reporting methodology as IFRS 17 is expected to take effect in Thailand on 1 January 2025.

Before migrating to WTW software, the cash flow projections that were used to determine TFRS 4 policy liabilities were produced by using a combination of an actuarial modelling software and multiple Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The liability valuation process involved manual extraction of policy data from the insurer’s policy administration system, running reasonableness checks on the data and preparing the data in the required format for model runs. Reserve figures generated by its actuarial modelling software were manually extracted, checked, and populated into a template for upload into the General Ledger for downstream preparation of financial statements.

Based on high-level estimation, the overall liability valuation and financial reporting process required the involvement of at least five team members from the actuarial, finance and accounting teams, and took two weeks or longer to complete. As there was no automated audit trail to record changes made to the models and process, the teams faced substantial difficulty to keep within the reporting timetable whilst ensuring the accuracy and integrity of their financial results.

Our approach

WTW and the insurer worked collaboratively to deliver a comprehensive solution to a complex business problem. Our value-added services included software trainings, actuarial model migration support, implementation of the insurer’s IFRS 17 methodology within WTW’s software, extensive process automation of the liability valuation and financial reporting process, as well as project management from commencement to completion of the projection. We also collaborated closely with the insurer’s accounting advisor to implement the mapping of IFRS 17 results to the insurer’s financial statements and disclosure forms.

WTW’s philosophy is to impart our best-in-class actuarial techniques to our clients through our technology. Our collaborative approach with the insurer ensured that the insurer is fully confident of our solution and continue to own, use, modify and maintain its actuarial models and workflows autonomously.

The results

Through our process automation software Unify, the insurer is able to automate and govern the IFRS 17 reporting process by:

• implementing a single master workflow controlling four smaller workflows. The advantage of this modular approach is that the work could be carried out in very efficient, focused blocks in order to allow the entire project to be managed and implemented by a small team
• ensuring each model has its own governing workflow which performs activities that are specific to that model, such as downloading input data, data cleansing and transformation, downloading assumptions and setting off workflows to perform calculations and/or posting activities
• applying review and approval steps at significant checkpoints to allow user groups to check the outputs at intermediate steps and providing users with the option to terminate the workflow or repeat the process in the event of errors. The enforcement of review cycles is automatically carried out by Unify, and the full audit trail and responses are also automatically stored.

Benefits realised by our client

With the adoption of WTW Unify, the insurer enjoys the following benefits:

• Optimises time and actuarial resources by focusing on reviewing and interpreting the results instead of setting up the model run or updating spreadsheets
• Creates savings in the effort and cost due to automation, integration and removal of slow manual processes
• Ensures high quality results by removing inevitable errors caused by manual processes to assist reviews
• Ensures data security and confidentiality by presetting security roles for each Unify user group
• Supports best practice governance due to convenient control of process and automatic production of full audit trail as well as version control for IFRS 17 results, allowing complete reproducibility
• Reduces work-related stress due to simple, clear and consistent IFRS 17 reporting process