A specialty property and casualty insurer had grown over its 150-year history to generate $8 billion in annual revenue with operations covering multiple industries in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and several European countries. This success, however, also bred complexity.  With operations spanning 115 companies and several lines of business, the organization needed a way to streamline and modernize its capabilities in financial management as well as financial planning and analysis (FP&A). 

With the help of the Workday Insurance Accelerator, the Deloitte team implemented Workday Financial Management and Workday Adaptive Planning to accomplish the company’s goals. In addition to Workday Adaptive Planning, the scope of the solution included the following Workday Financial Management modules: Financial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Banking & Settlement, Expenses, Procurement, Supplier Accounts, and Assets.

Working closely with the insurer’s leadership, the Deloitte team developed a Workday-enabled solution that: 

• Provides consolidated financials for all 115 companies—replacing core financial systems for 111 out of 115 companies and ingesting the results of the remaining four to create an enterprise-wide solution.
• Replaces the legacy, manual allocation process, accomplished by creating over 1,500 allocation definitions in Workday.
• Reduces licensing and maintenance costs by replacing multiple legacy applications.
• Automates and standardizes the spend-approval process.
• Consolidates banking and cash management across the organization. 
• Integrates with key suppliers.
• Offers access to details on transactions (e.g., premiums, claims and commissions) by giving users the capability to drill back from summarized journals in the Workday ledger.
• Supports regulatory and management reporting of historical accident data from the same source as financial data. 
• Provides an always on, always up-to-date FP&A platform that transforms the entire budgeting and forecasting process, including workforce planning, revenue forecasting, and operational expense budgeting.
• Introduces industry-leading forecasting practices, models, and standardizations across lines of business.

In addition to these accomplishments, the project team blazed a new trail by implementing Accounting Center, including Prism Analytics, as an early adopter. This involved ingesting, enriching, and summarizing transactional data from over 30 sources for posting to the ledger and providing drill-back capabilities for reporting. The team also built a holistic allocation engine that centralizes forecast and actual allocation logic in a single place for ease of maintenance and enhancement.

While the solution helped this specialty property and casualty insurer to navigate its unique form of complexity, the innovations it spawned can now be used to help insurance organizations to transform their finance organizations and to gain the insights and agility needed to optimize and adapt.