Legerity's CEO, Jeremy Wood, explains how the vendor's FastPost Express solution can help insurers with the IFRS 17 accounting standard. He also discusses cloud technology's impact on the insurance sector
How can Legerity help insurers comply with IFRS 17?
Legerity has its FastPost Express product for IFRS 17, which is a SaaS solution. It offers a fully configured IFRS 17 out-of-the-box solution for all sizes of insurers.
FastPost Express has been very successful over the last year in helping insurers implement IFRS 17 quickly and cost-effectively. Many of our clients have completed their implementations and are now doing parallel runs of the standard.
We launched FastPost Express at the end of 2020 and now have IFRS 17 projects in 35 countries.
Technically, FastPost Express is a cloud-native technically advanced solution. Clients can be assured it offers very robust processing and strong enterprise-class security levels.
We score above some of the other out-of-the-box solutions because they tend to be spreadsheet-based, less robust, and more tactical in nature. Our view is that those solutions will ultimately be unsustainable.
Another area where we differ is our people. We have a fantastic team of SMEs that deliver successful projects and we have the highest client satisfaction ratings for IFRS 17.
Where are insurers typically now in the IFRS 17 process?
Stages vary across the insurance sector. At Legerity, we have some of the most advanced implementations. We have several clients who have been through the dry runs and are now in the parallel phase, which means they are accounting for both IFRS 17 and IFRS 4 this year.
At the other extreme, there are still firms coming to the market that have to comply with the standard by next year and have not yet started. There is still time for these firms to meet the deadline using solutions like FastPost Express for IFRS17.
For those insurers who have been more strategic about it, instead of being purely tactical, IFRS 17 is helping to improve finance data quality. It has helped them source data, which is more comprehensive than before, as there is a more granular set of accounting requirements.
By executing IFRS 17 in a strategic way, this will inherently improve insurers' finance processes and overall business insight.
What are Legerity's priorities for 2022?
For one thing, there is still quite a journey to go on IFRS 17. The standard is due to take effect in January 2023. However, there will still be a long tail of activity that comes with the bedding down of new operating models and rationalisation of solutions.
In addition to IFRS 17, Legerity also offers IFRS 9 and wider finance transformation solutions for insurers.
ESG and the role of finance is another new area for us. We did our first webinar on this topic last December, and are starting to work with some of our clients on ESG reporting. Our software lends itself well to that.
Looking ahead, we are well placed. We founded Legerity in November 2014 and now have offices in London, New York, Hong Kong and Poland.
We doubled our staff headcount last year, and having opened up in the US in Q4 last year, we will continue to grow this year.
How do you expect cloud technology to develop and impact insurers in future?
The last 12 months have been a coming of age for the cloud and the insurance sector. Programmes like IFRS 17 are high-profile projects, and they get a lot of airtime with C-level management, which is a good thing. In many cases they have accelerated cloud adoption.
I think the investment the industry has put into cloud technology over recent years means the cloud's security, robustness and scalability is now better than traditional on-premise alternatives.
It is also important to point out that being cloud-native is different than just having a cloud strategy. What cloud-native means is that you have technology specifically built for the cloud, which leverages the full technology stack and becomes an integral part of your end-to-end systems architecture. This is markedly different than just running a legacy application in the cloud.
