Transforming Financial Reporting in Insurance: From closing cycles to continuous insight

The new era of financial reporting for insurance companies is underway. After years of preparation, new standards like IFRS 17, IFRS 9, and LDTI are now in place, significantly impacting day-to-day activities, particularly the periodic closing process.

However, these requirements didn’t arrive in isolation. Insurers must also comply with regulatory requirements and ESG reporting, while maintaining existing local GAAP or tax books.
The challenge is clear: reporting teams face demanding requirements in volume, frequency, timeliness, and complexity, all within the same or shorter time cycles.

During implementation, the focus was on data preparation and compliance. While sourcing, integrating, and cleansing high-quality data remains a hurdle for many insurers, attention is now shifting toward optimizing closing processes into a cohesive reporting framework. The goal is to eliminate manual steps and workarounds, reduce errors, speed up closing, and maximize synergies between different reporting regimes.

Simply adding new systems to existing methods won’t achieve these improvements. The closing process often requires complete restructuring to fully leverage new technologies.

In this article, we will explore how technology provides a real solution to customers’ financial reporting needs and how it can automate and optimize processes, and even go a step further.

The most challenging step has been completed: accountants and actuaries now work more in integrated teams, leading to better understanding of the overall process. Seamless cooperation is built on real-time data covering premiums, claims, expenses, and reinsurance.

The next critical step is incorporating remaining reporting lines into one common framework to achieve synergies between regulatory and financial reporting. Since finance, risk, and prudential closings are functionally linked, their production processes shouldn’t be treated in silos.

A solid common data structure provides the basis for all reporting lines, ensuring consistency, traceability, and transparency. This unified approach facilitates automation, reduces reconciliation efforts, and enhances data governance.

The technology to support this transformation is available, though providers and tools must adapt to insurance industry specificities. While processes like bank reconciliations, accounts receivable/payable workflows, and fixed asset depreciation require automation, the real benefits for insurers come from automating the end-to-end process – including liabilities calculation, controls, measurement calculations, and multiple reporting templates.

Automating the close-to-reporting process, from raw data and controls to final reports, is now feasible. Implementing appropriate controls and reconciliations is key to avoiding data and step replication. Validation rules and anomaly detection must be embedded at every workflow stage.

Cloud computing resources can be scaled during period end to anticipate performance challenges and optimize for speed. More importantly, scalable data architecture ensures that as business volumes grow or new regulatory requirements emerge, the existing framework can handle them with minimal marginal cost. This scalability is crucial for meeting future demands – whether a new IFRS update, evolving local regulations, or integrating an acquired portfolio’s data.

Beyond capacity, scalability enhances flexibility and resilience. Dynamic workload distribution, automated resource provisioning, and intelligent performance monitoring allow systems to self-adjust to fluctuating demands. This elasticity safeguards reporting timelines and ensures consistent service quality across operational peaks.

By offering horizontal and vertical scaling, cloud-native tools dynamically optimize processing power and storage, balancing cost efficiency with peak performance. Organizations gain sustainable, future-ready infrastructure that supports continuous transformation, faster innovation, and improved user experience across finance, risk, and compliance functions.

The Addactis solution‘s integrated workflow platform is key to automation, significantly reducing manual intervention and errors while cutting end-to-end processing time from days to minutes. Strong calculation engines handle all related steps, including reserve and cash flow preparations, allocation of key variables (like expenses), and complex IFRS 17 calculations (such as CSM or RA). Clients also perform Solvency II calculations on the same platform, achieving maximum synergies.

Our solution’s robust reporting capabilities allow the time saved on number preparation to be dedicated to analysis, what-if simulations, and projections.