Abstract
Gain Compliance enabled Noelle Wolf, FFVA’s Director of Financial Reporting, to achieve process efficiencies and a peace of mind previously unknown with her legacy vendor. In this customer story, you’ll hear how she experienced immediate benefit upon moving to a modern software solution.
Key Quote
“It all sounded great, but I didn’t believe it until I started using it and saw how everything came together in the Notes. It literally saved me days.”
Noelle Woolf, Director of Financial Reporting, FFVA
Background
For the past two decades, Noelle Woolf has been a team of one doing the work of the company’s NAIC reporting. Over that time, she had become very familiar with Booke Seminar’s TCP product and had built her approach and processes around it.
In 2020, FFVA was subjected to a mandatory migration to SOVOS as Booke Seminars was acquired and TCP was discontinued. Noelle was frustrated by both the transition and the new experience. Simply put, the entire experience was a disappointment. And, after a year of using SOVOS, she concluded, “That’s it, I can’t do this anymore.”
Noelle considered her alternatives and took a look at Gain. Liking what she saw, she made the change. “After I began using Gain, I was thrilled with the move.”
Parallel Moves, but Different Outcomes
FFVA’s implementation of Gain occurred a year after its switch to SOVOS.
That transition to SOVOS had been rocky, and afterwards Noelle never felt comfortable with the new product. “Everything was different [in SOVOS]”, she said. “The view was very congested, and there were all these different visual elements that just didn’t make sense to me.”
In comparison, the move to Gain provided a stark – and refreshing – contrast. After an onboarding experience that she graded as “A+”, Noelle realized immediate time savings and a range of benefits from Gain’s Cloud-native application.
One area of significant lift was in the preparation of the Notes. She had always prepared them using Microsoft Office products. Noelle recollected, “I would spend days in that Word doc, just to get everything formatted correctly.”
With the move to Gain, the PDF of her Notes is “perfect” and she further loves how this outcome is achieved with very minimal effort. Noelle recalled being skeptical about how easy the Notes would be in Gain. “It all sounded great, but I didn’t believe it until I started using it, and saw how everything came together in the Notes. It literally saved me days.”
Thoughtfully Designed Support for Validations and NAIC Guidance
Noelle found that understanding and fixing validations in SOVOS presented a formidable undertaking – “a huge process” as she described. By comparison, “in Gain, it’s just so quick and so easy,” she explained. “The way the view is presented, it’s just very clean. The descriptions are very user-friendly. And, if I need more information, I’ve got a link that will take me right to the instructions. And once it’s fixed, it drops off the dashboard, and it all happens so quickly.”
Keeping current with NAIC changes also became easier with Gain. Previously, to stay abreast of the evolving requirements, Noelle attended seminars in the run-up to each annual filing, and it was her responsibility to understand and implement process and reporting modifications that affected FFVA’s two entities. “The company used to spend so much money sending me to those things, but there’s no need now. Gain does all that research for me and puts it right in front of me on the screen when I open the software.”
In addition to time savings, Gain delivers peace of mind as well.
As Noelle explained: “It gives me a lot of confidence that I didn’t miss anything. Now I know ahead of time: Gain makes me aware of changes that have affected my tables. I no longer have to follow some example to incorporate the change; the system does it for me.”
Conclusion
Familiarity with a legacy Annual Statement software often masked the host of manual tasks required to support its use. As modern, Cloud-native software for NAIC reporting, Gain removes those types of tasks, leading not only to increased statement efficiencies for the people doing this work, but to increased confidence in their work as well.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.