More than 440 insurance accounting and finance professionals from a wide variety of firm types and sizes participated in The 2015 Insurance Investment Benchmark Survey, conducted by Clearwater Analytics. The survey inquired about the common challenges insurance investment professionals face and examined the industry-wide causes of these problems.
Data gathered from The 2015 Insurance Investment Benchmark Survey revealed that nearly half of U.S. insurers still rely on manual processes and workarounds to perform at least some of their investment accounting and reporting.
This is not surprising to anyone involved in the insurance investment industry. Despite the ways that technology overall has evolved towards cloud-based automation, there are still many insurers that rely on manually entering, verifying, and reconciling investment accounting data.
While the installed systems that require this kind of work were once cutting edge, they—and the processes required to make them work—have become outdated and inefficient. Investment and accounting teams relying on outdated solutions know that they are a major cause of operational inefficiency—in fact, the more than 100 CFOs who took the survey cited manual processes as their primary obstacle to greater overall efficiency. The downstream effects of manual systems and processes has both short- and long-term implications for data accuracy, timeliness, and efficiency.
Be sure to download The 2015 Insurance Investment Benchmark Survey Report to see all the survey results, including information on interest rates, the month-end close process, and CFOs’ strategies, predictions, and operational challenges.
To learn more about what The 2015 Insurance Investment Benchmarking Survey participants had to say about their operational tools, and for information on new industry best practices, read Clearwater’s white paper, The Persistence of Manual Processes.