This edition of the InsuranceAUM.com podcast featured Rivvit CEO Matt Biver and Deputy Chief Investment Officer Ken Musick, of EquiTrust Life Insurance Company, on the topic of insurance data strategy and the benefits of a single source of truth for asset managers and investment managers. Moderated by Stewart Foley, Founder and Managing Partner of InsuranceAUM.
As a co-founder and former CEO of Grandview Analytics, Matt has worked for and with many investment and financial services firms on aligning their enterprise data and technology. In this podcast, he chats with Ken about a single source of truth, meaning, “a single repository for all of the data throughout an organization that gets brought together so you can look at things comprehensively and make better decisions based on that data.”
Insurance companies tend to have a variety of different data sources, including external managers, accounting systems, order management systems as well as market data and much more. Because this data comes in different formats from many different providers, it can be quite challenging to manage.
“The single source of truth gives you the ability to look at all of that data based on enterprise guidelines and policies to govern that data so that everybody who’s looking at the data is looking at the same thing and making decisions based off of the same information,” said Matt.
“In the absence of this single source of truth, you often find that you have different analysts with desktop applications that are using different sets of data to report on the same metrics, and you end up with different perspectives based on who’s preparing a report or an analysis. So, it’s really valuable from the perspective for efficiency and decision-making,” he added.
Too often in this industry, portfolio managers spend excessive time working with accountants to validate the numbers in their reports to figure out the “truth.” Insurance companies and other investment and financial services firms use Rivvit to centralize data from all their sources into a single platform, where portfolio managers as well as back-office and middle-office personnel can get trustworthy reporting about performance, goals, plans, and other metrics.
“Now, I can click a button, and I can push a report to a portfolio manager and say, ‘what happened over the past week, month, year, etc.? What is the plan to meet our objectives?’” said Ken. “We make more decisions, better decisions, but not only that, we can plan more effectively as well.”
We invite you to listen to the full podcast here.