Finance and accounting innovator, Phinsys, has swept up three awards after impressing the judges with a cloud-based offering that’s bringing an overlooked back-end function into the age of automation.
- Best Automation Solution Provider
- Best Data Solutions Provider
- Best Software Provider – Digital Back End
Jennifer Bollen investigates...
Digital investment in finance and accounting functions has lagged claims and customer data and communications solutions, with many insurers still using spreadsheets and other unreliable data sources.
Lack of quality, granularity in financial data, and unfit technology infrastructure remain widespread amid the industry’s increasing cost and regulatory challenges.
That’s changing, thanks to software provider Phinsys’ mission to help firms automate processes, speed up the financial close, and expedite regulatory and statutory reporting. The Phinsys platform also enable greater control over finance and accounting data so that better and more informed decisions can be made about the direction and management of the business.
Each product provides 90% out-of-the-box, web-based functionality, which customers can configure to their unique needs.
Phinsys’ products comprise:
- A source-agnostic finance data warehouse and close management tool.
- A rules-based calculation and allocation engine.
- An accounting rules and ledger integration system.
- A regulatory reporting, bordereau processing and reconciliation system.
- A reporting data layer and visualisation dashboard.
Judges praised the business for working with insurers to solve painpoints and provide a single source of truth for repeatable and configurable financial processes.
Supporting growth
The offering means clients such as Aegis, Ariel Re, CNA Hardy, Chaucer, Apollo, and Hamilton, save significantly on administrative tasks and free up resources – or allows resource to be better deployed to more valuable tasks - while ensuring accurate, compliant and full reconciled financial information.
A customer said: “Insurers are increasingly relying on operational efficiency to drive growth and face the challenges of additional calculation complexity, data granularity and systems impact created by IFRS17.
“Phinsys’ accounting and finance technologies enable insurers to respond to these challenges by providing an end-to-end solution that automates processes and controls whilst reducing operational costs and freeing up resources to focus on growth.”
A senior accounting and reporting professional said: “Phinsys’ solutions and finance systems expertise will solve specific problems for our business. Not only will single functional currency from multiple jurisdictions into our parent company be faster and more accurate, but we’ll also benefit from a single, trusted version of data across different departments and new, detailed insights into our overall performance.”
Another client added: “Our legacy systems created unreliable data and perpetuated our reliance on spreadsheets, and Phinsys has provided us with solutions to these issues.”
Impact
Phinsys has demonstrated improved cost efficiency through digitised, automated finance and accounting processes.
For instance, it has enabled clients to reduce reporting periods for market data collection returns from 20 days to just five.
Customers have also reported an 85% reduction in efforts to run regulatory reporting after the close of statutory books - and no time lag between the production of management and regulatory reports.
One client achieved $750,000 of annual savings by decommissioning local reporting solutions, while another cut finance related operating costs by 75%.
Judges' comments
“Very strong solution in a very technical area.”
“Interesting set of solutions in an area which is often overlooked. Complex data flows, significant market traction and clear benefits.”
“Phinsys have worked with many commercial insurance companies to help solve pinpoints around reporting on single sources of truth from various departments for repeatable processes.”
“We don’t have a technology innovation problem in our industry, we have an adoption problem. When judging these awards, I focused on those that have also been successful in the implementation and use of the solution, not just a shiny new technology.”
