Helvetia focuses on innovation when planning premiums

Helvetia Insurance Switzerland, located in Basel, is a well-established insurance company. The Helvetia Group was founded in 1858 and operates in several European countries. Helvetia offers a wide range of products and services for individuals, companies, and institutions. Its portfolio includes life insurance, non-life insurance, and occupational pensions.

The challenge: Make planning simple, granular and reliable

"simple. clear. helvetia.” - this is Helvetia's brand promise to customers, shareholders, and employees. A pledge that should also be reflected in the insurance group's premium planning. Quite obviously, the labour-intensive and error-prone spreadsheet-based planning needed to be replaced by a modern planning solution in this regard.

In addition to simplifying the existing processes, the planning solution should enable faster responses to changing requirements, a refined planning granularity, and an overall streamlined planning process for the people involved. Helvetia set up a comprehensive evaluation grid to compare several top vendors invited to present a proof of concept (PoC), illustrating a specific non-life use case.

"Board joined the race relatively late”, recalled Andreas Schäppi, Head of Controlling at Helvetia Switzerland. “Yet, the Board staff showed up with a high level of personal commitment and were able to present a convincing PoC. Above all, the intuitive use, which was later reflected in less training efforts during user onboarding, and the price/performance ratio finally tipped the scales in favour of Board.”

The solution: High flexibility for top-down and bottom-up planning

The use case for the PoC was also the basis for the pilot project. Andreas Schäppi explained:

"Our aim was to implement the pilot project as quickly as possible and to build up in-house expertise for the following Board projects. That's why we chose a project where we didn't have to coordinate too many players. This enabled us to set up a working planning solution in just 6 months, from the first meeting to the go-live with only one external consultant involved."

For practical premium planning in non-life business, Helvetia Controlling provides the business target for the current planning period compared with the previous year's figures. The managers of the various business areas then allocate the current budget to the different types of insurance and hence define the targets for their colleagues. Using an internal logic these targets are quickly distributed in Board to the different insurance lines and sales channels. After the bottom-up process has been finished, the figures can be compared to the top-down targets and differences between the two can be resolved by either rejecting the bottom-up values or by adjusting the targets.

"When it comes to planning, we have a bit of a ping-pong game between top-down and bottom-up planning. All parties involved submit their assessments via the comment function. Thanks to Board's flexibility, the figures can be shifted and adjusted quickly," said Andreas Schäppi.

He continues: "The different types of insurance sometimes have special premium income patterns, e.g. for car insurance. These dates are when business is generally in full swing. With Board, we can map the distribution of premium income much more accurately over the months, but also over the distribution channels and sub-insurance types. This means that planning is much closer to the actual business," explained Andreas Schäppi. 

The generated data is automatically written back to SAP by Board and replaces the former manual process. The actuaries can directly use the planned premium volume as a basis for preparing the P&L. 

Following the successful introduction of premium planning, further use cases are in the starting blocks at Helvetia to be implemented in Board. These include:

• personnel cost planning,
• material cost planning,
• P&L simulation

The goal for the future is a truly integrated planning and a rolling forecast.

The benefits: Improved responsiveness and collaboration

"We were able to achieve all our goals with the pilot project," said Andreas Schäppi. "In particular, the internal logic of the system with its distribution pattern allows us to quickly distribute the target figures to all sub-categories. This saves us a lot of time and makes our work much easier."

In this way, new requirements from market and management can be implemented quickly. All departments involved immediately see what is expected of them and thus are able to quickly adapt. This increases responsiveness throughout the organization. 

Cooperation within the company was strengthened. "There is simply more dialogue," reported Andreas Schäppi. "Thanks to the easy-to-use commenting functions, everyone can contribute their assessment. No comment is lost, and everyone can see how the other participants assess certain specifications. This is the basis for starting a dialogue and finding solutions together.”

Due to the intuitive use of the planning solution, employees enjoy working with Board and satisfaction levels are very high. Past planning in Excel was much more tedious and new employees in particular find their way around the premium planning much more quickly in Board.

Andreas Schäppi is highly satisfied with the Board solution: "Board didn't promise us too much. We have been able to significantly simplify our planning processes. I'm looking forward to seeing what else we can implement with Board."