Swiss Re has formed a strategic partnership with software company SAP SE to develop a product addressing the increasingly complex demands of global regulators regarding financial steering and reporting.

Insurance companies currently must manage and report their business using a wide range of different valuations and regulatory reporting standards, said Swiss Re, noting that maintaining compliance and consistency is therefore a challenging process.

New regulations, such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 9 and 17, will also enforce additional reporting requirements, the company continued.

Consequently, insurers and reinsurers have difficulties capturing “reliable, comparable financial information for reporting and decision-making,” which significantly increases “internal process complexity, reporting efforts and operating costs,” Swiss Re explained.

As a result of these challenges, Swiss Re and SAP are working on a new approach to generate multiple valuations and apply financial steering methods based on the SAP HANA^® platform, which will enable processes “to be automated and controlled in a simple and effective way.”

Swiss Re said the product will be made “available over time to the entire re/insurance industry….”

This new approach aims to:

• Manage increasing regulatory complexity with the ability to easily incorporate new valuations and reporting standards (such as IFRS and U.S. GAAP) on an ongoing basis
• Reduce reporting efforts by generating multiple financial valuations simultaneously
• Cut the time spent on operational tasks and controls, while increasing the capacity for analytics
• Create the ability to steer the allocation of financial resources.

Gerhard Lohmann, CFO Reinsurance at Swiss Re, said: “I genuinely believe that together we can achieve our strategic vision to enable integrated steering and reporting for ourselves and across the industry.”

“We are proud to work with Swiss Re, a company with profound industry knowledge, to drive the development of new solutions that will provide the insurance and financial sectors with a significantly simplified approach to solving their sophisticated needs,” said Luka Mucic, CFO and member of the executive board of SAP SE. (The company’s global headquarters is located in Walldorf, Baden Wuerttemberg, Germany.)

“It’s our firm belief that co-innovation projects like these are what will guide and shape the future of our industry,” Mucic added.

Source: Swiss Re