It used to be blatantly clear when you were falling behind on current technology—you’d just have to look next door and see your neighbor was driving a newfangled automobile, while you were still riding in a horse-drawn carriage, and you’d start to wonder if you should upgrade your good ol’ carriage-and-Clydesdale to the better, faster, more efficient technology.
Nowadays it’s not quite as easy to determine if your status quo is outdated. Especially when it comes to investment accounting software. You can’t just look into your peers’ computers to see if they’re using a faster, easier, and overall better system to solve problems in ways you didn’t realize were possible.
When’s the Last Time You Looked Around?
Investment teams who have been using the same solution for years (or even decades) have come to accept inefficiencies—such as manually entering individual trades and transactions, aggregating lagging data from disparate systems, long turnaround times for closing the books, time-consuming and arduous Schedule D processing, and cumbersome reporting—as simply The Way Things Are.
If you’ve accepted as fact that there’s no way for your investment accounting processes and solutions to:
- Complete Schedule Ds by business day three (at the latest)
- Easily scale to accommodate new asset classes, new investment strategies, and portfolio growth
- Integrate data to decrease audit costs
- Proactively adapt to market and regulatory changes
- Provide streamlined, customizable and transparent reporting
- Automate manual data processing, aggregation, and reconciliation
- Monitor compliance with your internal and state mandated investment policy
- Analyze risk exposures and measure performance on a daily basis
- Improve data accuracy and efficiency in closing the books and preparing journal entries
- Actually appreciate in value over time, instead of become more outdated every year
- Eliminate the need for licenses, hardware, installation, or IT maintenance
- Improve employee satisfaction and eliminate manual inefficiencies
. . . then you might still be riding in a horse-drawn carriage while your competitors are speeding past in fuel-efficient, best-in-class, technologically-advanced cars.
Insurers interested in keeping up with industry best practices know they need to proactively explore new tools, solutions, and processes that could improve their investment methodology . . . or get left behind. You simply can’t know how your current process can be improved until you explore what else is available. There’s nothing to lose by looking around—and you might be surprised by what you could gain.
If it’s been awhile since you’ve asked What do my peers’ investment accounting and reporting processes look like? What do I need in an accounting solution that my current system isn’t providing? Is there a better, more efficient way to handle these processes? then you should schedule a demo with Clearwater.
Email us at salesinquiry@clearwateranalytics.com, or visit our resources page for insurers to learn how Clearwater can eliminate manual inefficiencies, improve your investment operations, and streamline your aggregation and reconciliation processes.