111: CPM in the Insurance Industry with OneStream

Welcome to the CPM Customer Success Podcast, where we help office of finance leaders enable an exact solution to enhance their corporate performance. Without spending countless nights and weekends in the office. Hi, I'm your host, Andy Smetana from Nova Advisory. Nova Advisory is a 100% OneStream professional services diamond implementation partner.

We help OneStream customers and prospective OneStream customers get the most out of their OneStream investments. For CPM customer Success listeners, we now have a weekly email newsletter to keep you informed on the latest CPM customer success news by subscribing today. We'll keep you informed on episode releases, including customer success stories. OneStream interviews and capabilities to keep you up to date about one Stream's unified platform for finance.

You can check that out now at Nova Advisory's website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast newsletter today. Today's episode is about CPM in the insurance industry with OneStream. Finance teams at insurance companies are responsible for much more than producing a set of financial statements.

They need to understand how premiums are performing, how claims are affecting results, and how the company's capital position may change. They also need to meet regulatory requirements while providing leadership with a clear view of their business. That responsibility becomes more difficult when the organization operates across multiple entities, regions or product lines. It becomes even more challenging when the information finance needs is spread across several different systems.

The general ledger may contain one part of the story. Policies and claims platforms may contain another. Additional assumptions may live in actuarial models, planning applications, or spreadsheets maintained by individual teams. In today's episode, we're looking at how OneStream can help insurance companies bring those processes together.

We'll explore some of the challenges that make insurance finance unique. We'll look at two examples of insurance organizations that use OneStream to improve their close reporting, planning, and reconciliation processes. So why is insurance finance so complex? Insurance finance teams still need to close the books, prepare forecasts, and explain financial performance to company leadership.

However, insurance organizations often need to view the same results from several different perspectives. Corporate finance may need a consolidated view of the business. A business leader may need to understand performance for a particular product or region. Regulatory reporting may require another structure entirely.

Those views need to remain connected even when they serve different purposes. Allocations can add another layer of complexity. An insurance company may incur costs that support several parts of their organization, and then finance needs to determine how those expenses should be distributed. The methodology may be based on the amount of business written, the number of policies being serviced, or the activity taking place within a particular area of the business When that logic is maintained outside of the finance systems, it can become difficult to manage.

The calculations may take a long time to run. Finance may also have limited visibility into how the financial numbers were produced. At the same time, the organization's operational information needs to connect with its financial results. Finance teams need to understand what is driving a change in performance rather than only seeing the final outcome.

When this work depends heavily on spreadsheets and disconnected applications, the team can spend much of the close moving information from one place to another. More time is spent confirming the numbers and less time is available to interpret what those numbers mean. OneStream provides a unified environment for financial consolidation, reporting, planning, reconciliations, and other performance management processes. For many insurance organizations, the most practical starting point is financial close and reporting.

A unified close environment allows finance to collect information from the company's source systems through a controlled process. Validation rules can identify issues before they move further into the close. Finance can monitor submissions and understand where each business unit stands in the process. Users can also move from a consolidated report back to the underlying information.

That visibility makes the close easier to manage and explain, and it can also give auditors a clear view of the process. Once actual results are available within the trusted financial model, the organization can use that same foundation for planning and forecasting. Finance doesn't need to move the final close numbers into another application before the planning process can begin. Historic performance and forward-looking assumptions can remain connected.

our first CPM customer success story comes from a regional mutual property and casualty insurance company. Before implementing OneStream, the company relied heavily on Excel during its month-end process. Data collection and reporting required a significant amount of manual work. The company also completed allocations in a separate application that had become difficult to manage.

Processing was slow and finance depended heavily on IT when changes or troubleshooting were required. The company wanted to create a more stable finance environment. It also wanted the business leaders to have better visibility into their financial performance. OneStream was selected as a platform that could support more than one finance process.

The initial implementation focused on consolidation and reporting. It also included cash flow reporting and the company's actuals allocation process. OneStream was connected directly to the general ledger. That reduced the time finance spent waiting for data and refreshing reports.

The company saved approximately two days each month through improvements to data integration and reporting. The allocation process also changed significantly. Rather than depending on IT to complete and troubleshoot the calculations, finance could manage the process directly. A calculation that had previously been slow could be completed in about thirty minutes.

Finance could review that information before and after the allocation. The team also had an audit trail showing how the results were calculated. Later phases expanded OneStream into budgeting and forecasting, people planning, and capital planning. One of the key use cases involved claims payments made directly from the company's bank accounts.

Those transactions needed to be reconciled daily. Waiting till the end of each month would have created too much manual work and delayed the identification of issues. OneStream capabilities completed much of the routine matching. Finance could then focus on the exceptions that needed investigation.

Through this phased approach, the company improved the stability of its close. Reporting became faster, the allocation process became easier to manage, and finance also gained more time to work with the results rather than simply producing them. So for our second CPM customer success story for this week, it involves a global insurance brokerage and underwriting organization. The company had grown rapidly through acquisitions.

As a result, its divisions had developed different processes and reporting needs. The existing financial environment made it difficult to maintain a consistent view across the group. Models didn't always reconcile easily. Reporting capabilities were limited, and the audit trail didn't provide the level of control the organization wanted.

The finance transformation team needed to standardize the company's core processes. However, it couldn't remove the flexibility where local businesses needed to operate their individual businesses effectively. That balance is especially important for a company that continues to grow through acquisitions. A new business needs to become part of the corporate reporting process.

But at the same time, its local teams may still need specific reporting details or a different way of managing their business. So OneStream was implemented in phases. The first phase focused on financial consolidation and management reporting. This work took place while two major divisions were merging.

The company needed to reconsider its organizational structures and create a financial model that could support future growth. Then later phases introduced additional planning capabilities. The organization also expanded into account reconciliations, employee costing, and task management. OneStream's extensible dimensionality was particularly valuable.

It allowed corporate finance to maintain a consistent group model, while individual divisions could still work with the detail that mattered most to their operations. The company didn't need to force every business into exactly the same reporting structure. OneStream also supported several acquisition-related processes. Finance can manage consolidation entries and foreign exchange calculations within a more controlled environment.

The platform provided a clearer audit trail of those activities. Workforce planning gave the company a way to compare employee costs against their budgets. Local teams could view that information at a useful level of detail. And at the same time, group finance retained a consistent corporate view.

The result was a guided month-end process that could be monitored centrally. Local businesses gained a more useful management reporting, while group finance gained stronger controls and greater transparency across the organization. So in closing, for insurance and finance teams, modernization often begins with a practical need. The close may take too long.

Reporting may require too much manual effort. Finance may be relying on spreadsheets that are difficult to control and maintain. OneStream can help address those immediate problems. The broader opportunity is to create a platform that supports finance throughout the performance management cycle.

In our CPM customer success stories today, we heard how one insurer began by improving its close reporting and allocation processes. It later expanded into planning and daily matching. The second organization created a greater consistency across a global group that continued to grow through acquisitions. It strengthened corporate control without taking useful flexibility away from its local businesses.

Both organizations followed a phased approach. They solved immediate challenges while creating a foundation for continued improvement. For insurance companies evaluating their own finance roadmaps, a useful place to begin is with the work that remains mostly manual today. That may be a slow close.

It may be a difficult allocation process. It may be reconciliation that requires hours of review. Identifying those challenges can help define the first phase of transformation. It can also create a practical path forward to a more connected and responsive finance environment Thanks for joining us for this episode of CPM Customer Success Reminder to check out the CPM Customer Success Weekly email newsletter to stay informed of the latest CPM customer success episodes and OneStream News.

You can check that out now at the Nova Advisory website, Nova advisory.com/podcast and subscribe to the CPM Customer Success podcast email newsletter today. Thanks again for listening, and I'll catch you next week for another episode of CPM, customer Success.