Western & Southern Financial Group was founded in Cincinnati, OH in 1888 and is currently a Fortune 500 diversified family of financial services companies that owns and manages total assets of $65 billion.

Before implementing Trintech’s solution, Western & Southern Financial Group had six life insurance companies with separate charts of accounts, each with various reconciliation and compliance processes. Each business function maintained its own method of documenting and tracking financial reconciliations. Many finance team resources spent the majority of their day performing high-volume transaction-based reconciliations manually.

The Need for an Automated Solution

It became clear that with more than 7,000 general ledger accounts reconciled monthly across different departments, an automated software solution would be required to ensure consistency and efficiency. As a privately-owned group of life insurance companies, Western & Southern was required to comply with regulations similar to Sarbanes-Oxley. Thus, management decided to take a top-down, compliance-focused approach towards its financial close and reporting processes.

Western & Southern needed a solution that offered a configurable workflow engine allowing for future evolution of processes, drill-down analysis of individual processes, controls and risk attributes. They also required a solution that was flexible enough to integrate with multiple internal systems, would eliminate repetitive routine tasks and create more time for higher-value activities, such as analysis and exception resolution. Western & Southern’s ideal solution would standardize the way reconciliation, certification and financial close and reporting processes were accomplished.

Western & Southern Financial Group Chose Trintech’s Solutions

Trintech’s solution provided a consistent workflow enforcing their standards around the review, certification and approval of reconciliations. 70% of their high-volume transactions are matched automatically, freeing up time for the research and resolution of exceptions.

Following implementation, 80% of general ledger reconciliations are now automatically reconciled while real-time reporting highlights potential bottlenecks, offering a snapshot of the company’s exposure to risk. The solution provides an automated “reconciliation by exception” workflow that has decreased the escalation process to financial reporting by nearly one month with an ability to provide more timely, summarized reconciliation reporting for each of Western & Southern’s six insurance entities.

The relationship between accounting and operational activities has historically been a ’pitch-this-over-the-wall’ exercise. There’s never enough transparency. But we’re changing that with Trintech’s solutions. They offer us real-time visibility into these activities that we just didn’t have before. – Jason Nickles, Director of Corporate Accounting, Western & Southern Financial

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