Client background

The client is a 110+ year-old leading provider of diversified retirement services, life insurance and employee benefit solutions and is a member of a multinational holding company. With over $3 billion in annual revenue and over 900 employees, the client also offers a unique portfolio of traditional fixed and indexed annuities.

The business challenge

The client was struggling with their traditional monthly processes because they were overwhelming and too time-consuming. They engaged Baker Tilly to assess their investment accounting processes to identify operational and technical bottlenecks and inefficiencies. The client wished to better understand pain points and problem areas related to the client’s systems, technology and resource dependencies, as well as understand options to mitigate significant turnover and operating challenges due to poor data quality, manual processes and conflicting priorities.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly facilitated a two day innovation workshop with client stakeholders, which included hands-on problem identification, solution definition and prioritization workshops rooted in deep insurance and investment industry research, design thinking and human-centered design. The workshop enabled Baker Tilly to:

• Collaborate with the client team and leadership to understand core operations and business activities
• Identify and categorize the core pain points, root causes and opportunity areas in the client’s current state processes
• Brainstorm and ideate potential solutions to address identified problem areas
• Execute future state visioning exercises to assess the viability, impact and timeline of potential solutions
• Prioritize solutions with client leadership to establish an actionable road map for sustained future-state implementation

The innovation workshop enabled the client to define and prioritize a set of opportunity areas and solutions that provided focus and direction for future efforts in a very short amount of time. The insights derived from the workshops were leveraged to develop a broader strategic road map for the client that defined specific projects and how to prioritize them to maximize business impact and return on investment.

The initiatives identified, such as operating model reorganization, vendor governance frameworks and several technology initiatives will improve day-to-day client operations and build toward more efficient, resourceful and technically leveraged procedures. It will also enable the organization to achieve automation capabilities to improve process efficiency, data availability and minimize the difficulty of organizational transformation.