CFOs support business and operational efficiency, thanks to big data

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Other parts of this series:

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In this blog series we’ve looked at the explosion of big data, and discussed how insurance chief financial officers can dig in to big data to provide sound decision-making and strategic guidance to the business.

Accenture’s paper, Exploring Next Generation Financial Services: The Big Data Revolution, identifies two additional ways that insurance CFOs can increase their stature and provide better support to the business, all thanks to big data.

Data isn’t only about making decisions. Often, good data can yield insights and an understanding into the way work is done—whether it’s revising processes or retooling an offer. The CFO can tap those insights to boost the company’s productivity and efficiency. With the right architecture, insights can be distilled from cross-organizational “data lakes” rather than single function siloes.

Getting more tactical, big data can equip CFOs to better manage risk and regulatory concerns. Through their actions, regulators acknowledge that data production automation is the better way to produce more reliable and complete reporting.

Each year, insurers are confronted with new regulatory requirements and challenges (Solvency II, global systemically important insurers (G-SIIs), Common Framework for the Supervision of Internationally Active Insurance Groups (ComFrame), International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 9 and 4 phase 2, data privacy…). Authorities require more detailed information within short deadlines and consistency between various business, prudential and financial reports.  New reports can be pulled from more current data in a more dynamic way, given the right analysis tools. The big data revolution helps with integrating multiple accounting and prudential standards, multiple jurisdictions and currency management.

The availability of big data and advanced technologies allows real-time simulations and scenario analysis. And with the right data collection tools, insurance CFOs will not only be able to gather data for reporting more rapidly—they also can lower costs, thanks to improved efficiencies, and gain significantly richer insights.

So, if big data can make such a dramatic difference for insurance CFOs, how can it be better incorporated into a business? See my next post for next steps.

CFOs support business and operational efficiency, thanks to big data