The Deloitte Insurance Business Platform Accelerator – enabled by SAP 

The remarkable point the insurance industry has reached

The announcement of the new Financial Reporting Standard, IFRS 17, has forced the insurance industry to go through years of profound transformation. The new standard made it evident that many insurers needed to modernise fast and had to invest significantly.

In the effort to become compliant, implementing the right technology was a major driver of cost and complexity – and delays. To meet the deadlines and still allow for better long-term decisions, tactical solutions had to be built for aspects like group reporting or planning – often poorly integrated in the overall Finance landscape and optimised for the single GAAP IFRS 17 only. Also, if implementation of IFRS 17 didn’t go smoothly, insurers were forced into simplifications and workarounds. Many insurers, especially larger ones, soon focused on a Minimum Viable Product.

In consequence, the industry lost sight of its future vision for Finance – or, at least, achieving it was no longer its priority, until 2023 when IFRS 17 became applicable in most jurisdictions. And that is where we are now. Modernisation has begun but some operational gaps remain, and massive investments have been made, though often just for compliance reasons and without bringing much benefit to the business, yet.

Where Finance in Insurance needs to go

In these difficult circumstances many insurers are not eager to make further financial transformation efforts anytime soon. They want their previous and upcoming investments to pay off , in reduced costs, increased simplicity and efficiency, and greater transparency. Going forward, this will involve a lot of automation for which they may not have the ideal architecture and process landscape.

Insurers’ tactical solutions in Finance may now become strategic solutions, but ideally in a fully integrated way, together with end-to-end optimisation like Data Quality assurance from source systems through to group consolidation. Centralised Business Steering, including Planning & Forecasting and ‘What-if’ simulation across local GAAPs, economic frameworks and IFRS 17, may now become a priority, but the industry isn’t there yet. There is neither the internal political will nor the budget now to make bold moves and experiments. Smaller steps have to prove their immediate value for the insurer, towards their future Multi-GAAP Finance value chain.

How Deloitte can help with their solution

We support insurers on their journey in these challenging circumstances. We started with a visionary offering many years ago and built a modular end-to-end Global Consulting Priority Asset – our Insurance Business Platform Accelerator, enabled by SAP.

The Insurance Business Platform Accelerator fills a gap in the insurance market – Multi-GAAP Accounting and Business Steering. There is still no equivalent, mature, integrated finance solution available from another standard software provider. Our SAP Insurance Core Team has built up specific expertise based on our collaboration with a leading Swiss Reinsurance company and SAP since 2016.

This model company asset has been built on the basis of lessons learned from many of our clients’ launches of the IFRS17 SAP Accounting Engine. Thanks to this we can help clients in their specific areas of need along the end-to-end closing process, from operational source systems through to Subledger, General Ledger, and Group Consolidation. All components and example data are available to demonstrate the next steps for clients and accelerate them, alongside our experienced teams. The Finance value chain can be improved from day one.

The Insurance Business Platform Accelerator helps our clients successfully process data, perform reconciliations and validate postings. Our Data Quality solution can assess data completeness and processing readiness in SAP; it prevents data-related errors and speeds up the whole reconciliation process.