Fast-track growth and drive greater impact with intelligent finance transformation

Rapidly evolving regulations. Volatility. Inflation. Supply chain disruption. Geopolitical tensions. Technological advancements. For chief finance officers (CFOs) in the life and annuity insurance business, today's challenges are tough.

But there is a clear path forward: intelligent finance transformation.

Challenge

The finance and accounting function is the beating heart of any business. So, the business architecture that underpins the function is incredibly important. It links strategy with execution, enabling insurers to deliver for their customers. But new challenges require a new architecture. The old one just won't cut it anymore.

In the past few years, the CFOs of major life insurance companies have had to tackle:

• Radical shifts in consumer needs, behaviors, and expectations
• New competition from disruptive business models and enhanced product offerings
• The digitization and innovation of policy underwriting capabilities
• Increasingly data-driven regulatory reporting requirements
• Organizational pressure to streamline operations on a global scale and to further reduce costs

The job of the CFO, then, is to transform the finance architecture to meet these new challenges. Such a transformation entails:

• Streamlining reporting. As statutory and regulatory reporting requirements continue to expand, insurance companies must now report across myriad activities and jurisdictions. CFOs have to ensure compliance and reduce the amount of time spent on non-value-add jobs, such as data gathering
• Driving sustainable growth. CFOs need to use data for more than reporting, though. They must also use it to perform actuarial modeling. And they must mine it for actionable insights into market trends to improve performance
• Implementing digital transformation. Advanced digital technologies are catapulting startups forward, disrupting the industry, and reinventing legacy business models. CFOs need to harness these technologies to rethink the finance function and implement radical change
• Delivering operational excellence. CFOs have to bring operations up to date by rolling out cloud-based enterprise resource planning systems and enabling remote working. This can help to tackle one of their ongoing top priorities: cost optimization

Life and annuity insurance is incredibly complex. It's also a sensitive financial product: meeting customers' needs into their retirement and after their loved ones die. The way CFOs manage finance has a direct impact on the quality of the products and services their customers receive. So, how can CFOs of life and annuity providers in the insurance industry handle all these challenges?

Solution

It's not enough for CFOs to try to manage these challenges one by one. Instead, they require a holistic approach. This means transforming the overall business architecture of the finance function to deliver sustainable and intelligent operations that drive growth. This is what will make the finance function into a true strategic partner to the CEO and board of directors in their respective capacities. Genpact's proven consulting framework, process rigor, and operational expertise help clients with opportunity identification, strategy development, and end-to-end transformation that's tailored to finance. Here's how:

Five steps to intelligent finance transformation

1. Define the vision: Instead of implementing a one-size-fits-all solution across the business – which only takes into account the present or only relies on the past to chart the future – a zero-based design approach starts with a clean sheet of paper to link organizational designs to strategic priorities, reimagine the business, reset the cost base, and free up funds. Our first step, then, is to conduct zero-based design thinking workshops to define the vision, identifying where your business is and your ideal state. Then we help you to establish a case for change. We map out exactly how the transformation will run and set up a transformation global program office to direct it.
2. Design business architecture: Then, we map out processes, policies, and controls design, as well as the service delivery model design. We enumerate the business requirements and build the business architecture around it, including the data architecture and the digital systems architecture design.
3. Implement target operating model: Next, we implement the refined operating model and complementary solutions across your finance processes, end to end. We manage innovation programs, transition work into purpose-built GBS centers of excellence, and modernize global delivery across the board.
4. Enhance enterprise performance management including financial planning and analysis: After that, we improve all aspects of finance performance management with IP frameworks and processes, such as report rationalization, cost allocation optimization, performance reporting and scorecards, zero-based budgeting, forecasting and finance analytics. Following this step, you will understand exactly how you're working and what you can do to improve it.
5. Leverage digital technologies and analytics: We use all kinds of advanced digital technologies to transform your financial operations and drive growth. For example, we implement robotic process automation of finance processes to speed up work and eliminate errors. With AI we collect data and generate management and statutory reports 40-50% faster. We apply cognitive and machine learning to finance processes to derive game-changing insights from your data. And we build dynamic workflows to orchestrate processes, meaning that your best people are working where they're needed, when they're needed.

Impact

The impact of our work to transform finance in life and annuity businesses is clear. Our clients have described:

• A better view of finance roles and responsibilities, which enables more strategic thinking
• Improved cash flow and asset-liability matching accuracy
• Less time and effort required during the close period
• A 30–40% reduction in planning effort
• A 40–50% reduction in the overall cost of finance to the business

Our CFO clients in the life and annuity business will also tell you that Genpact's work has enabled them to eliminate burdensome transactional processes and finally serve as a strategic partner to the CEO and board of directors by delivering insights that support major business decisions that push the company in the direction of growth. At Genpact, we help insurers reinvent finance to deliver continuous improvement and delight their customers and policyholders – by delivering whatever they need, whenever they need it, wherever they are.