Abstract:
Canal Insurance Group transitioned from its legacy software to Gain Compliance for the Q1, 2023 period for its two entities and Combined Statement. In this Customer Story, you will learn how the team had navigated the obstacles in their previous vendor’s software, and what happened when those obstacles were removed.
Key Quote:
“With Gain, it’s really intuitive and just more like the modern software I’m used to using, so it was easy to get acclimated to it.”
Megan Holmes, Financial Reporting Supervisor
Background:
When Megan Holmes joined the Canal team in 2018, she was new to insurance accounting. She learned to navigate and produce stat filings through the legacy software the company had used for almost a decade.
The challenges of this legacy software – incomplete support of the filing, outdated design, validation deficiencies – created reporting challenges which were instantly solved through the adoption of modern software.
Notes:
Megan recounted the challenges of legacy software, including creating key parts of the filing outside of the software: “As I worked on our yellow book [from our prior solution], the user interface wasn’t all that user friendly. The biggest thing was the Notes – having to do the electronic Notes and the written Notes separately; it was very hard.”
Canal’s financial reporting team relied on Microsoft Word to complete this section of the filing. As time went on, Megan’s responsibilities grew to “own” that document and process. This entailed:
- managing the Notes framework to reflect the ongoing changes to NAIC requirements and guidance,
- ensuring the data in the Notes documents rolled through the quarters, including not just current and prior period comparisons, but also Annual vs. Quarterly levels of details as related to disclosure states,
- battling the formatting challenges of tables, including wrapping and page breaks, and
- uploading both the printed version of the Notes – after significant effort to ensure a professionally formatted document – as well as manually entering the Electronic Notes Data.
All of this was time wasted.
Megan explained, “I felt like I spent a lot of time on administrative tasks – making sure the margins are correct, that the tables look like they need to look, and that a page break doesn’t happen in the wrong place – all those tiny administrative things that were so time consuming.”
Further, throughout those tasks, she was also dealing with software that ran very slowly. “When I opened the Notes identifier, I would go get coffee or do something else because I knew it would take time for it to load.”
The Challenges of Installed Software:
As a further complication, Canal’s legacy tool leveraged software architecture and code that was outdated. It relied on an installed client which must be administered by IT staff as it was subject to sporadic updates and bug fixes.
This impacted the filing experience – particularly at year-end when the reporting challenges were the greatest and time was of the essence: “We used to have to wait for updates, then we’d have to wait for our IT department to install those updates and then we’d have to check those updates.”
Validations and Data Quality:
The update process was not only disruptive, but also insufficient: “We knew about certain ‘gaps’ they had in their validations and we had to work around that… we’d be running validations over and over again after we’d have closed out of things,” she said. “I had to send out a message in Teams to ask people to get out of the software whenever I wanted to run those. We had to kick people out to do other things as well. It was just clunky and outdated and we had to work around that.”
Modern Software Design and Performance:
Leveraging Gain Compliance’s solution – including a purpose-built, modern Notes solution – relieved Megan of the manual and administrative tasks of this section of the filing. “Just being able to focus on the Notes without worrying about tying the electronic and written pieces together makes it a better experience for me and I think it has made our Notes more accurate as well. That, and I’m not waiting ten years for the Notes to load.”
Gain’s native cloud-based architecture eliminated the need to manage updates and greatly improved user experience. “The navigation in Gain is so easy and, by being on the cloud, there was no waiting on software updates like we had before.” she explained. “With Gain, it’s continuous; we don’t have to deal with that old process. So that was helpful and it really sped things up.”
Canal also benefited from Gain’s superior validation process. “One of the things I really like is the validations. We can see the validations as we work on the filing.” Megan recounted. “I can see the validation issues in the section I’m working on. As I fix them, I immediately see that the particular validation issue is resolved.”
The visibility into validations carried over to the entire statement. “I would say it’s easier to navigate through the different parts of the statement and being able to have those different parts of the statement on different tabs in my web browser, so there’s a lot of visibility that wasn’t possible with [our prior software].”
The visibility the user interface provided made it easy for her to get up and running quickly in Gain. “In general, accessing software online is what I’m used to, so this software fits that. All the information is in one place and the software makes it easy to navigate through it,” she said. “With Gain, it’s really intuitive and just more like the modern software I’m used to using, so it was easy to get acclimated to it.”
Educational Resources:
Megan also appreciated the education Gain provides when it comes to navigating the NAIC guidance. “Those resources were great; before we were even using Gain, we had your Resources Library bookmarked because it was such good information about statement guidance.” She continued, “It’s even more powerful in the software; it’s great to be able to see how Gain breaks down the guidance, and then when you click on the instructions, it takes you right to the specific information you need. That was really life changing.”
Conclusion:
Gain Compliance has reset expectations around how reporting software works.
Many stat accountants have become acclimated to the limitations of their legacy software. These limitations result in unnecessary manual processes and delays for financial reporting teams when time is at a premium, and are instantly solved with modern software.
Eliminating this waste allowed for time and effort to be re-allocated to value-added activities. As the only native cloud product approved by the NAIC, Gain Compliance delivers a modern experience centered around customers and how teams work together to complete these challenging filings.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.