Case Study: Halving Treasury Report Processing Time
The ability to create timely, accurate reports is critical for any insurance and investment business. From customer statements to regulatory reports, operational reports such as reconciliations and accounting, and business intelligence reports that analyse trends and support management’s strategies – all these draw on disparate data sources that must be managed effectively. AEGON’s treasury runs on Wallstreet Suite, an integrated and strategic platform.
The company also needs to compile reports combining multiple in-house systems manually, which was time consuming and increased the chance of error. Many of the company’s departments (front office, middle office, back office, accounting and management) rely on reports compiled at least in part from Wallstreet Suite. Therefore rapid and accurate report production is essential. “Our reports were compiled by gathering information from various systems.” said Marcel Reuser, AEGON group treasury operations support. “This information then had to be processed and compiled manually into Excel spreadsheets. An average report took more than 45 minutes to produce – and was prone to human error.”
AEGON’s challenge was to implement a tool that could automate data extraction and provide a streamlined and accurate reporting tool that would improve the overall efficiency of the reporting process.
AEGON decided to implement SkyREPORT to improve reporting, mainly for its treasury and cash management departments. The system helps the user create tailor-made management reports. Once reports have been created, senior management can access the solution to immediately view them on an ad-hoc basis, without having to trouble treasury staff to compile data manually.
The solution uses Excel as its presentation layer and has a level of functionality that allows employees to input specific parameters; for example, scheduling specific reports to run first thing in the morning. It also allows old reports to run in the system, eliminating the need to rebuild the report while also enabling users to link all the relevant information together for a more detailed view. Overall the solution provides flexibility, the ability to customise reports and greater accuracy.
Since the introduction of the solution, departments within AEGON have the ability to create and implement new reports that weren’t possible before. The automation of the reporting process has allowed the company to achieve its objectives of reducing time and cost, and improving efficiency.
“Our efficiency has improved as all the information can be collected in Excel, reducing our manual report processing to half the previous time. And it has practically eradicated the instances of human error,” said Reuser.
The company is looking to move more reports onto the solution soon, and it is also running tests on future upgrades to the Wallstreet Suite, helping to reduce the time spent on regression testing before upgrades go live.