Finance transformation for insurance broker

The sudden departure of our client's Finance Director presented a good opportunity for a holistic review. We were engaged to review the client's finance function, the way the team operated and the skillsets it required from new recruits into the department.

Approach

We used a two-phase approach, identifying areas for improvement (current state) and suggested a prioritised list of improvement initiatives (future state).

In relation to the current state, we conducted the following:

• Understand current state procedures through interviews with the finance team and any other identified stakeholders, including areas of pain, frustration, challenge, difficulty.
• Identify the roles and responsibilities of the individuals through a detailed activity analysis.
• Assess current state for strengths, weaknesses in controls/ governance and identify opportunities for quick wins, understanding and documenting processes currently in place at a high level.

The results of our analysis allowed us to develop an improved future state organisation design that would reduce costs and enhance efficiency.

Outcomes

The outcome of our review was the identification of improvement initiatives for seven key areas of weakness:

• Inefficient and high-cost finance function – our client's finance function was more expensive than its peer group's
• Low value add, limited capacity and capability to support business decisions – a high proportion of time spent on transactional activities left little time for value-add activities
• Timeliness and accuracy of management information – management information was available relatively late after the month-end, decreasing its usefulness
• Key dependencies for finance and sector-specific knowledge and skills – large volumes of knowledge were undocumented, increasing the difficulty of training and upskilling staff
• Manual, labour intensive and non-standard finance processes – processes were highly manual, increasing time requirements and associated costs.
• Control environment necessitating reactive management controls – weaknesses in early stages of certain processes increased workload for ensuring control down the line
• The systems landscape was fragmented and underutilised – multiple non-communicating systems were used, at times by staff with incomplete training

We arranged our initiatives into an implementation plan to help the client in their deployment, also advising them on good change management practices.

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