A Six Step Guide to Managing Spreadsheet Risk for Insurers
A guide designed to help insurance companies navigate their way through the spreadsheet risk...
Solvency II And Spreadsheet Management
The Challenge Of Solvency II
While insurers are well practiced at managing Solvency II, the challenges of spreadsheet risk remain for many, as spreadsheets continue to be central to many core Solvency II business processes. Many regulators are seeking to enhance their scrutiny of spreadsheet risk, to enhance the overall resilience of the financial services sector. As insurers implement ‘big data’ capabilities to help manage their business and their compliance, they recognize the need to understand how Solvency II data, held on myriad spreadsheets across the business, can be effectively migrated onto the new environment.
Spreadsheet Risk And Insurers
Insurers have invested heavily in their corporate IT systems, processes and applications to manage Solvency II, however spreadsheets remain a key element in managing their business and their compliance. Their power, flexibility and ease-of-use means they are often the ‘go to’ tool to plan investments, develop models, develop management reports and create regulatory submissions. These spreadsheet often act a data feeds for the corporate IT systems, creating a data dependency issue for Solvency II.
The lack of effective change control processes can generate issues where they are used in the process. These issues – stale data, missing data, flawed formulas for example – have the potential to compromise the calculations and reports. Management, shareholders and regulators increasingly expect insurers to have a unified management framework in place for their spreadsheet environment, as they have in their corporate environment.
The Solution: Spreadsheet Risk Management
ClusterSeven offers powerful spreadsheet risk management capabilities for Insurers that cover:
- Comprehensive spreadsheet discovery – identify the critical spreadsheets in your business processes, to build the foundations for effective spreadsheet risk management.
- Inventory management – define which spreadsheets are essential to your processes, and identify the most significant files that have to be monitored most closely.
- Spreadsheet monitoring & review – quickly and easily identify issues – missing data, stale data, and erroneous entries for example that can compromise the accuracy, quality and integrity of your Solvency II results.
Our solutions provide the transparency and auditability essential to efficient and effective compliance.
