In this client testimonial, Josep Maria Sales, CFO of Allianz Seguros, gives a first-hand account of his experience working with everis on a digital finance transformation project.
The Company
Allianz Seguros Spain is the local subsidiary of the Allianz Group, a global financial services provider operating on almost every continent and headquartered in Munich, Germany. With over 142,000 employees worldwide, we offer 92 million customers in more than 70 countries a wide range of insurance and asset management products, services and solutions, achieving total revenue of €130.6 billion and an operating profit of €11.5 billion in 2018.
Allianz Seguros is one of the leading companies in the Spanish insurance market, achieving total revenue of €3.3 billion in 2018. We have 2,200 employees and a network of more than 13,000 insurance agents and brokers distributed across its local branches and regional offices, providing nationwide coverage and services to over 4 million private and corporate customers. We invest in technology for our customers’ greater convenience, offering them an app for smartphones and tablets, an eCustomer area on the corporate website and send over 500,000 text messages annually.
We take pride in our comprehensive range of products and services, one of the most extensive and innovative in the market, which is based on the concept of integrated security for both private and corporate customers. These include Life, Car, Home, Accident, Health and Multi-Risk insurance solutions, tailored to our customers’ needs.
Challenge
We were faced with the challenge of adapting to the new market reality while maintaining our leadership position as a growing and increasingly profitable company. To this end, Allianz Spain’s strategy is fully aligned with the Group’s strategy, which is to position ourselves as one of the most trusted international financial services providers and as world leader in sustainability. This means creating sustainable economic value through long-term commitment to sound corporate governance, social responsibility and environmental management.
The new business paradigm triggered by the digital revolution has placed new pressures on finance executives to play a more strategic role as business planners and technology evangelists to pioneer a change in mindset to a data-driven culture. This can only be achieved by deploying the necessary resources to structure and implement transformation across the board to generate greater strategic impact.
This is a tall order.
Therefore, we needed a partner with proven experience in digital finance transformation to help us successfully harness the business-critical information locked in our data.
Ability to “transforming while performing” was key.
everis helped us by jointly designing, developing and implementing a financial reporting unit to help the company’s executives make better, data-driven decisions based on timely and actionable business insights.
Leading Finance Organization action on 6 key transformational levers to deliver on the promise
Financial Objectives
The personnel of the Data Management Department focus mainly on the generation of reports during monthly closing periods. The rest of the time is dedicated to the improvement and automation of reports and projects (new reports). Therefore, we needed to implement a solution that would allow us to improve our financial reporting capabilities, support the Allianz Financial Data Management Office in the Business As Usual Service (BAU) and collaborate in the transformation of the Finance Department, specifically addressing certain weaknesses in the current reporting process:
- Very high volume of reports
- Limited follow-up on the use of the reports issued
- Difference of criteria in the preparation of reports among different departments
- Manual creation or with MS Office (Excel)
- Limited data availability from other areas, with protocols that provided room for improvement
- Need to formalize and further implement management and governance activities
To this end, we defined a project roadmap based on four main objectives:
- Ensure the provision of information services
- Update the database as support for the generation of periodic DM Finance reports
- Creation of DM financial reports (monthly, quarterly, annual)
- Creation of reports on request
- Share knowledge and expertise in the report generation process in order to reduce operational risk
- Detailed documentation and grouping of the Data Management Office’s procedures
- Improve robustness, traceability and automation of the information reported by the Data Management Office powered by MicroStragey
- Increase operational efficiency
- Reduce reporting time during the reporting period
Milestones Achieved
The everis and Allianz team have efficiently and effectively integrated the Allianz Data Management Office, minimizing risks, creating an information services structure and improving performance indicators. After the restructuring, greater focus of the team is devoted to transformation and to serve upcoming reporting needs. The new automated financial reporting solution has allowed us to achieve several milestones to date:
- Simplification - The number of reports has been reduced by 25%
- The workload during the reporting period has been reduced as a result of the automated reports
New reports have a greater level of automation through a combination of MicroStrategy and MS Office.
- The time dedicated to projects and ad hoc requests has increased
Through the rationalization and automation of year-end reports, the workload has been redistributed to new projects, use of new tools and ad hoc requests.
- The culture of analysis and data validation has increased
Controls have been implemented among the different reports and the calculation criteria are being validated with the different areas involved.
- The team’s versatility has increased by incorporating expert members from different areas
Experience working with everis
Looking to the future, at Allianz Seguros we have embarked on a journey of digital finance transformation that calls for leveraging data, automating business processes and creating more competitive products and services aimed at reshaping the customer experience. But this not only calls for implementing cutting-edge technology… in order to be able to “transform while performing” we must also create a culture of transformation and innovation within the company. Only then can we achieve our goal of becoming a global financial services provider capable of adapting to continuous market changes with minimal disruption.
everis accompanied us in every step of the transformation process, helping us to find the perfect balance between performing and transforming by leveraging digital technology to allow us to achieve our ultimate goal: meeting, and exceeding, our customers’ needs.
