Make real-time product profitability a reality in insurance

Make product performance visible, faster

The current state: Data fragmentation and delay 

Even when product performance data exists, it’s often fragmented — spread across finance, underwriting and claims systems that don’t speak the same language. Connecting those data points into a cohesive, decision-ready view takes time, manual effort and deep familiarity with each system’s logic.

“For many insurers, data is spread across three or four systems, and there’s no clear way to tie a transaction in underwriting to its financial impact,” said Jon Bell, Grant Thornton Business Consulting Senior Manager. “Finance teams spend hours reconciling data between systems — time that could be used to analyze performance or influence business decisions.”

These challenges span the industry. For some large insurers, the issue is legacy complexity. For startups or acquisitive firms, it’s speed: systems were stood up quickly, without a unified data strategy. In both cases, the result is the same — slow insights, inconsistent reporting and decisions made with limited visibility.

Map the metrics that matter

Faced with fragmented data, many insurers rush to implement new platforms — choosing best-in-breed tools for finance, underwriting and claims without aligning how those systems will work together. But without a common strategy or shared data model, those investments often deepen the disconnect. A more effective approach starts with clarity: What decisions need to happen faster, and what data is required to support them?

Key questions include:

• How can we tell — early — that a product is drifting below target profitability?
• What early indicators suggest a shift in loss ratios or underwriting profitability?
• How do we align actuals from underwriting and claims with our FP&A forecasts?

Once leaders align on the critical product performance signals and how they’re defined, teams can determine the source systems, define the required data structure and design integration workflows that support timely, accurate reporting. They should:

• Integrate finance, underwriting, and claims data in a way that aligns definitions, timing and granularity — often by mapping key fields like transaction types or policy identifiers — so the outputs are actually comparable.
• Define and standardize the key performance indicators needed for product decisions.
• Build reporting workflows that deliver alerts and real-time visibility to the right stakeholders.

Build real-time reporting around decision points

Once those metrics are defined and aligned across systems, the next step is making them accessible in real time. That’s where reporting design becomes critical — not just in terms of tools, but in how dashboards support business decisions.

Effective dashboards aren’t just KPI displays — they’re layered tools that reflect how decisions are made. At a minimum, CFOs should ensure product dashboards include:

• Dynamic profitability views by product line
• Drilldowns to policy or customer level
• Automated variance analysis against plan

For real-time responsiveness, some teams set rules-based alerts for shifts in claims ratios, premium-to-loss thresholds or revenue-per-policy benchmarks. The underlying architecture matters too: data must be structured at the right level of granularity, refreshing on a cadence that matches business needs (such as daily or weekly) and reconcile cleanly with actuals from core systems. Tools like Adaptive Insights, Anaplan or Power BI can support these capabilities.