Insurance Finance Transformation: Services Overview

The recent financial crisis has been far reaching. Achieving high performance in this new reality requires the finance function to play a greater role in decision-making and an active approach to driving business value.

The industry has been hit with full force across multiple fronts, including: significant depletion in asset values, lower customer loyalty, slowing business demand, increasing cost ratios, higher incidence of fraudulent claims, reduced credit ratings for some insurers—and tightening regulations for all.

Now—as seen in other industries that have had to innovate to address the challenges of previous economic cycles and competitive threats (for example, global energy, pharmaceuticals, retail and consumer packaged goods)—insurers must accelerate their efficiency efforts while also gaining greater insight into enterprise performance to better steer their businesses through these difficult times.

Industry leaders have already significantly increased their focus on operational efficiency and recognize the need for improved capabilities to assess growth opportunities, customer innovation, product differentiation and distribution. Based on lessons from other industries, those that fail to adopt will likely be consumed by the winning competitors.

Achieving and sustaining high performance requires a new level of operational rigor enabling the finance function to play a much greater role in enterprise-wide decision making and taking an increasingly active approach to driving business value.

Accenture helps CFOs reshape their organizations to address insurance industry imperatives, focusing on the finance mastery agenda and increasing the value they bring to their insurance business. We combine the experience of our dedicated global insurance practice with more than 2,500 professionals committed to the finance and performance management function.

This combination of our insurance industry knowledge and deep finance functional experience—underpinned by our in-depth understanding of enterprise risk management, our enabling tools and technologies and our business services capabilities—helps our clients move their finance organizations forward and ultimately achieve high performance.

Accenture is ready to help you weather the current economic downturn and build operational excellence to meet your needs. And there are a number of different ways in which we can work together to get started and go forward—from simple tactics to rapidly lower costs or address other immediate issues, to broader value-based initiatives that bolster finance capabilities, pursue current and future market opportunities, and ultimately achieve high performance.

Not only do we have an exceptionally strong track record of delivery within prescribed budgets and schedules, we are also willing to explore the right commercial options and working arrangements that optimize the success of finance mastery programs.

The assets that Accenture brings to help insurers throughout their finance mastery journey have been honed through years of proven industry and solution implementation experience. They include:

• Accenture Finance and Accounting Strategy Toolkit: Provides a structured approach to align the CFO agenda to the priorities of the business. By leveraging deep benchmarking experience, in addition to on-going High Performance Business research, we are able to rapidly assist finance leaders as they establish the right priorities across the finance function to focus efforts on the most value added activities for maximum impact.
  
  
• Insurance Business Process Reference Models for Finance: Encompasses the full range of insurance finance capabilities, sub-capabilities and process flows for more than 200 finance and accounting processes. Applied in concert with our Finance Capability Assessment Models—which provide detailed descriptions of leading finance practices in insurance along with the risks and controls associated with key accounting processes—these assets help accelerate insurance finance transformation programs at lower cost and risk.
  
  
• Solvency II Implementation Framework: Provides the diagnostic capability—across both the functional and technical aspects of Solvency II—required to allow insurers to understand where they are according to the regulation and to plan their implementation journey in tandem with broader business information requirements, resulting in a comprehensive business-focused outcome.