IFRS 17, the accounting standard for insurance contracts, requires insurers to measure contracts in groups using current estimates of cash flows, with a risk adjustment and a contractual service margin1. In practice, it pulled actuarial and finance data together at a level of detail many insurers had never reconciled.
Where the close slows down
The pressure points are familiar: premium, claims and cash that do not agree across policy, claims, bank and ledger; reinsurance recoveries identified late; and assumptions and cash flows that cannot be traced back to source without a spreadsheet chain. Each is a data problem before it is an accounting one.
- Reconcile continuously: match premium, claims and cash across systems during the month, not at month-end.
- Govern the inputs: treat contract-group, cash-flow and assumption data as critical data elements with owners and quality rules.
- Keep the trail: attribute-level lineage from the reported figure to the policy and claim.