Tokio Marine HCC Cuts Reporting from Weeks to Days and Turns Finance into a Strategic Advisor with Planful

Tokio Marine HCC is a specialty insurer. It covers cyber, agriculture, directors and officers, and a long list of other lines, with offices around the world and a parent company in Japan. 

All of that runs on numbers that leadership has to trust and access quickly. Five years ago, the corporate reporting team needed a new solution. Reporting was almost entirely manual and lacked the deep insight that leadership wanted.

“We are supposed to provide insights and analysis to executive management and do something beyond just putting the numbers together,” says Anna Trenchuk, Vice President and Head of Corporate Financial Reporting at Tokio Marine. “Planful helped us to eliminate non-value-added work.”

With Planful in place, Tokio Marine HCC has:

• Cut reporting time from weeks to days
• Completed all external reporting within two weeks during its IFRS transition year
• Begun drafting reports before the ledger closes, instead of waiting for the data
• Automated whole reporting processes, not single reports
• Freed capacity to take on ad hoc requests from executive leadership
• Shifted the team from validating numbers to advising executive leadership, junior staff included

Tokio Marine HCC needed an automated reporting layer that could pull clean data straight from the ledger, carry the manual adjustments and off-ledger context that every insurer deals with, and refresh without a rebuild.

“We’re not trying to automate just single reports,” Anna says. “We’re trying to automate processes.” It is a lesson she now shares with other Tokio Marine group companies facing the same reporting load.

• Reports pulled straight from the ledger, built in Excel. Spotlight gives the team a flexible reporting surface inside Excel, with Dynamic Planning alongside it. “You can pull information straight from the ledger and layer on top any manual adjustments, or anything executive management wants to see,” Anna says.
• Reporting underway before the ledger closes. Data loads daily and refreshes every two hours during close. “We don’t need to wait for the data to be available,” Anna says. “We can start drafting and getting our reports ready as soon as possible.” Leadership even has a name for it. “They like to joke that we simply push the button.” 
• Analysis pushed down to the whole team. Reading the numbers used to be senior-level work. “We switched from just putting the numbers together to actually analyzing and thinking through what the numbers represent,” Anna says. “Now we’re pushing it down, and our staff and juniors are capable of doing the same.”
• The tool is easy. The people are the multiplier. Anna is direct about where the results actually come from. “Planful is great in terms of how it’s user-friendly, all that quick access to the data,” she says. “But how to actually go one step further and use most of what this tool offers, that’s about people.” Her team put in the extra effort to make the tool the new normal, and Anna sums up the whole approach in a line: “The great tool needs great people.”

Next on the roadmap is implementing Planful AI to change how Tokio Marine approaches reporting. 

“Planful AI is in everyone’s mind, and it’s definitely the future,” says Anna. The goal is to introduce assistants that can combine data points faster, surface the granular story sooner, and ask the right questions in time to act on them. And Anna is clear about the role she expects AI to play.

“We don’t believe it will fully replace people,” she says. “It will be an assistant that helps us be more powerful in what we can see in the data, and how we provide those insights to executive management.”

The reporting team does not tie out numbers anymore. It analyzes them. Work that ran for weeks now takes a couple of days. Close lands in five days, and reporting is already moving before it does. When the IFRS transition arrived, the team cleared all external reporting in two weeks, a deadline the old process could not have met.

Speed was not the only gain. “With Planful, we were able to significantly improve the quality of our analytics,” Anna says. With the manual work gone, the team finally had room to say yes. “If some ad hoc requests come into play, we are open to it,” Anna says. “We want to see how else we can support our executive management and make a difference.”

The real change runs deeper than the time saved.

“We are no longer that boring reporting function,” Anna says. “We want to be someone with the whole spectrum of knowledge and almost that magical power to see through the data and be an advisor to our executive management.”