Abstract
When statutory reporting veteran Cory Brown became CFO at PracticeProtection, he was tasked with staffing up a financial reporting team to complete the statutory filings for the company’s two reporting entities.
In this customer story, you will learn how Cory’s prior experience with Gain at one of the largest U.S. insurers informed his decision making in this role. You will also understand how Gain compressed the time for a newly-minted statutory accountant to make a meaningful contribution to the Annual Statement reporting process.
Key Quote
“It’s just really intuitive. For the people we brought on, who had been using modern cloud software most of their lives, Gain was immediately familiar to them.”
Cory Brown, CFO, PracticeProtection
Background
In 2019, Cory Brown was a consultant tasked with streamlining the financial reporting processes for one of the nation’s largest Property and Casualty carriers. Two geographically-separated, discrete teams were tasked with completing the NAIC filings for its forty-plus reporting entities. One team used Eagle’s Wings; the other, Booke’s TCP.
Both software products offered only inadequate Notes solutions. Accordingly, both reporting teams opted to manage their Notes in Microsoft Word. Despite the significant time investment, the end product didn’t match the team’s efforts: “The results didn’t look professional at all, and it was disappointing because people spent a lot of time – I’m talking countless nights – trying to get the Notes to look right. The output simply didn’t reflect the amount of time the team was putting into them.”
When a private equity firm acquired both the Wings and TCP products and consolidated them under the SOVOS banner, it forced its customers to a single solution. This proved serendipitous, as Cory and his client leveraged the moment as an opportunity to evaluate alternatives. Through this, they learned of the possibilities of Gain’s modern, Cloud-native solution.
The insurer’s two reporting teams adopted Gain’s Notes solution, expanded to Full Statement soon after, and became the first of a rapidly-growing list of major carriers that moved from SOVOS to Gain Compliance’s modern software solution.
Next Mission – Building a Financial Reporting Team
Upon completion of his consulting engagement, Cory took on a direct role in industry as CFO of PracticeProtection. He was tasked with building a reporting team to bring financial reporting for the company’s two entities “in house” after previously outsourcing this service.
An early, and obvious, choice was to again opt for Gain for its Annual Statement solution.
In training new talent for his team, Cory wanted to focus his instruction efforts on statutory accounting principles, not on software. “When you have new team members join using legacy systems like SOVOS and someone came to the team without experience with yellow books, you spent 90% of your time teaching them the software, and very little time on how statutory accounting worked.”
With Gain, he was able to flip the script: its intuitive interface and workflow not only eliminated time spent on software training, but Gain’s design also accelerates understanding of the statutory reporting domain for new talent.
“It’s just really intuitive, and for the people we brought on, who had been using modern cloud software most of their lives, Gain was immediately familiar to them,” Cory explained.
He then described how Gain’s real-time data model and visual layout assisted in making it easy for his newly-formed team to understand how individual data fields and schedules were connected to the whole. “They have validations up on one screen, the statement up on the other, and they can see how their adjustments clear the dashboard,” Cory said, “it’s almost like putting a puzzle together, and it’s fun when you put a missing piece in place.”
A Senior Accountant’s Perspective
Like many in the statutory reporting world, Jonathan Wallace’s formal accounting education was based in the GAAP framework.
He learned the nuances of statutory reporting in a professional setting – initially as a part-time employee at PracticeProtection while in college and then, in a full-time capacity, upon graduation in 2021. Jonathan joined Cory’s newly-formed financial reporting team as the company brought its financial reporting function in-house after years of outsourcing.
The first time he saw Gain, he found it instantly familiar. “At this point in my career, I had used all sorts of different cloud-based applications, and Gain was a lot like them.”
Gain’s intuitive interface eliminated the need for functional training, allowing Jonathan to concentrate on the domain itself. “I didn’t have to learn the software; I could focus on learning the different aspects of this reporting, and that was a huge relief as I first got into it.”
As a Senior Accountant, Jonathan is responsible for gathering data from other core systems, and ensuring that everything is tied-out and balanced. The real-time element of Gain provides visibility while he manages large data sets. “When I’m entering a lot of different data for a lot of different states, to have Gain showing me, ‘there’s something here, check this out,’ is super-helpful.”
Jonathan noted that Gain provides flexibility for continuous improvement of their statement workflows. “We can look at our processes, what worked and what didn’t, how can we sharpen it up, or make it easier for us, and Gain is a great platform for doing that.”
Conclusion
As statutory reporting experience has begun to move into retirement, the need to find – and train – new talent surfaces. As younger people join statutory reporting teams, they do so with deep experience with modern software, and much less experience with statutory reporting. By making this daunting subject approachable, and making statement data flows discoverable, Gain makes it easy for teams to compress the time-to-value for new team members.
Learn more about how Gain has improved outcomes for financial reporting teams for other carriers.