A Panel Discussion With Beazley and PwC: Navigating Uncertainty in the Insurance Space

Workday Elevate brings together business leaders to discuss industry trends and best practices around HR and Finance transformation, and how best-in-class technologies can achieve those ambitions.

PwC was a top-tier sponsor at the London event in 2023 and featured in a panel themed 'Navigating uncertainty in the insurance space'. Tom Brown, PwC Partner and Head of Insurance & AWM, joined Beazley's Head of Finance Operations, Dauda Jammeh, and Workday's Financial sector industry expert, Viren Patel, for a candid conversation about real-life challenges companies face on their financial and digital transformation journey and how technology and expertise can come together to deliver the best outcomes.

VIREN: Tom, let’s start with the business environment. What’s it like for insurers out there?

TOM: There are huge challenges for the industry, including pressures from inflation, losses arising from natural catastrophes and the war in Ukraine. More specifically, customer needs are changing post pandemic and insurers now have no choice but to use digital channels.

On top of this, there’s a raft of new regulations coming down the track, including IFRS 17 and evolving regulations for ESG. Finally, the adoption of innovative technology also means skills gaps are opening up.

On the opportunities front, the growing role of technology, such as the use of APIs and data, and the Lloyds Blueprint Two (BPII) both guarantee an improved customer experience. Technology is enabling insurers to pivot faster and helping simplify and de-risk operations.

VIREN: Dauda, how does that resonate with you at Beazley?

DAUDA: I recognise all those challenges and, personally, prefer to see them as opportunities. The skills gap is a big one for us as a function. Innovation often creates skills’ shortages, so we need to think hard about how we up-skill and re-skill people. We also need to create capacity for our teams to be involved in activities that add value. Manual processes and transaction-related work don’t add value and don’t give us a seat at the table where the meaningful, strategic discussions are taking place.

On evolving ESG regulation, this is a great opportunity to ‘design with data’ and create something that allows us to scale and be agile enough to be respond to new and changing regulations.

VIREN: Tom, back to you. As we talk about those challenges and opportunities, what do finance functions in insurance need to do? What does good look like?

TOM: For me, the first imperative is, simply, to become a better function – to take a fresh look at how the function organises itself and governs itself. The second one has got to be the end of transaction processing as we know it. We still visit finance functions up and down the country where practitioners spend four days a week on transactions. We need to flip that from 80% transactions to 80% insights.

The third thing is around sourcing capability. The sheer complexity of implementing transformational technology and the fast pace at which we aim to do this is driving a lack of capability. We must figure out where in the market we can get other pots of capability.

The fourth one would be to ensure that finance transformation is process led. When I think of any business case I've ever written, I've never seen an ERP business case that stacks up on its own. It’s the wider change that goes on around the implementation – and particularly the implementation of best practice processes – that delivers the real value and ensures that the total cost of ownership stacks up.

VIREN: So, Dauda. We’ve heard from Tom. How does Workday enable what Beazley wants to do? What benefits do you expect to realise from your implementation?

DAUDA: A big aspiration for us is to move away from our legacy systems and to have all our data in one place. Currently, we have multiple systems and no centralised data management structure. We’re looking forward to taking advantage of Workday Prism Analytics. That will enrich our reporting capability and enable us to be more dynamic in how we report the climate across the business.

At the moment, we’re in deployment for P2P with Workday. This will enable us to move from highly manual processing for things like accounts payable to an approach that is touchless and straight-through. The P2P component of Workday comes with optical capture recognition – OCR for short – and this will enable us to move away from mailbox management and to ingest invoices in a completely new way. This is somewhere we expect to realise early value.

Finally, we want to move away from end-user computing applications. Workday should help us do that. Having dashboards and in-built reports at our fingertips, within the system, means we won’t have to build new reports and models periodically to respond to requirements or demands from the business.

VIREN: Tom, how about you? What do you see as the Workday differentiators?

TOM: For me, four key differentiators stand out. First, the integrated system and software makes everything seamless and reduces multiplicity of systems. Second, the exceptionally intuitive user experience, which makes Workday genuinely usable for everyone. The whole solution enables self-service, allowing employees to do new things in new ways. We have to mention speed too. Workday enables Finance to operate almost in real time – so insurers like Beazley can now run a continuous close.

VIREN: Dauda, can you walk us through the deployment approach at Beazley?

DAUDA: Our approach targets early value realisation, wherever possible. So, we’ve seen early delivery of Workday Adaptive Planning to support our premium-forecasting process. I’ve also mentioned P2P, being delivered now and which will bring immediate value to our wider stakeholders. We have also successfully delivered Workiva disclosure management in four months to support our year-end reporting for 2023. We plan to integrate this with Workday in 2024.

We’re using an Agile delivery methodology to design, build and test our solutions early and get working solutions in front of users as early as possible. This approach complements and enriches the Workday implementation by having user stories, acceptance criteria and financial controls built into the development. This is a real departure from the waterfall/semi-Agile approaches typically advocated for ERP delivery. Workday’s recognition of ‘show and tell’ and increased end-user engagement aligns well with our overall delivery approach.

VIREN: What are the hurdles you have encountered during the implementation and how did you overcome them?

DAUDA: Initially, using an Agile approach was a challenge. But working with PwC on a shared approach and big-room planning sessions have allowed us to plan better across multiple teams.

Data is a significant piece of the puzzle and needs close attention from the start. Data architecture, data modelling, data integrations, data remediation and migration, and data sourcing (lineage) are all areas that impact the enterprise. So we needed to consider all this with a wider stakeholder group. We are currently breaking these areas down into their constituent parts and assigning the right people on each.

VIREN: What are your key takeaways? Do you have any advice for insurers considering adopting Workday?

DAUDA: Do set out a clear vision with an end state in mind. Be data driven. Make the people experience and customers central to decision making. Be willing to fail fast and learn fast. Finally, don’t underestimate the level of change and remember – true innovation takes time.

Finance transformation is proving key to enabling businesses in the insurance space to meet a wide range of current challenges, spanning everything from global political uncertainty to rapidly changing expectations on the part of customers and employees. Best-in-class technology solutions, like those from Workday, implemented with deep expertise from PwC, give insurers the flexible capabilities they need to continue to adapt to an evolving business environment and to meet new challenges that will inevitably emerge.

This article was originally published on the PwC website and can be viewed here.