Client background

The client is a growing multi-line, multi-state property and casualty (P&C) insurance company with more than $450 million in annual direct written premium.

The business challenge

Juggling information from multiple managing general agents (MGAs) on a monthly basis for premiums, claims and other related information was an administrative burden. The client’s process for obtaining and utilizing this information was extremely manual in nature including receiving emails with attachments, copying and pasting data from attached spreadsheets into multiple internal Excel templates, and various other Excel formula updates being performed for proper accounting and journal entry creation. This process was cumbersome, caused significant delays and, on occasion, errors in the processing and posting of accounting transactions.

Strategy and solution

After discussions with the client on the challenges and ultimate end vision, Baker Tilly worked with the client management team to define business requirements and developed a comprehensive solution for the data intake, storage, processing and posting of the monthly MGA data feeds.

Baker Tilly approached the problem through the following solution components:

• Built a web/client facing portal for the secure upload of data (e.g., csv files) to minimize the email traffic and potential data loss
• Established a series of data tables within the data warehouse where the uploaded MGAs data was directed to be stored
• Developed and deployed a series of data transformation scripts/pipelines to standardize the data and transform it into useable formats
• Created an automated process to create the monthly journal entries needed for processing the MGAs files (e.g., premiums written/earned/unearned, claims paid, reserves posted, premiums/losses ceded, etc.)
• Initiated an automated journal entry posting process to post the created journal entries directly into the client’s general ledger (Oracle Fusion Financials)

The MGA data automation solution reduced the time to process these transactions from over multiple days to a few seconds. This monthly time savings is enabling the client to explore additional MGA relationships and scale operations without increased personnel. Additionally, the client is able to leverage the standardized data within the platform from all MGAs to have better visibility into their business, perform various analytics (e.g. program/MGA level analytics, comparative ratio analysis). Resulting from this initial engagement, Baker Tilly is working with the client for five additional data and automation projects to streamline operations across the insurer and position them to continue to grow.