Finance needs to become more flexible in the way it operates to promote collaboration, innovation and diversity of thinking. It’s important to quickly form pools of talent (e.g., accounting, actuarial and data analysis) to respond nimbly to changing demands of the business and support innovation and change. Temporary reporting lines and agile ways of working can empower these teams to make decisions and solve problems creatively.
Finance is on a pathway from purely transactional relationships to advisory partnerships with stakeholders. Closer collaboration across finance, actuarial, operations, and underwriting teams is driving better long-term results, fulfilling reporting requirements more efficiently and enhancing visibility into performance in ways that benefit decision-makers across the organization. Data analysts and data scientists are key enablers in this process, helping generate more insights and value to the business.
The key questions to ask:
- What is the critical information required for board directors and senior executives to understand business performance and make key decisions?
- How do we ensure we have a commonly defined set of performance metrics that people and teams own?
- How do we proactively engage the business to bring deep analytics skills to rich data sets?
- How can we break down barriers across functions and create a culture of collaboration around common goals, rather than siloes of thinking and activity around specific skills?
Joint accountability models will become even more important, as insurers embrace ecosystems and platform-based businesses, involving outside partners and multiple lines of business to deliver broader and personalized offerings to clients. The ability to deploy small, cross-functional teams to accelerate innovation will also be key to success in the ecosystem era.
With these changes and new talent on board, finance executives will need to modify their leadership styles to be more adaptable, balancing the need for oversight with the value of empowered teams with more autonomy. Managers may consider adopting agile practices and the concept of disciplined freedom, where experimentation is encouraged amongst team members in line with clearly defined goals, incentives, and a common set of values. Emotionally intelligent leadership to support teams and connect them to the vision is critical especially during times of transformational change.