Workiva Continues to Expand Wdesk Use Across Public and Private Insurance Companies
Customer Success Drives Adoption;
Wdesk Recognized by Insurance Industry Magazine
AMES, Iowa, March 30, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Workiva (NYSE:WK), creator of the Wdesk cloud-based productivity platform for enterprises, announced today that Wdesk use continues to expand throughout public and private insurance companies to help streamline business data processes and mitigate risk.
"Wdesk is well suited to the insurance industry because insurers face a variety of risks and regulations," said Matt Rizai, Chairman and CEO of Workiva. "The need to simplify processes and improve accountability among hundreds of collaborators is driving Wdesk seat growth for expanded use cases within insurance risk and management reporting."
"Wdesk increases our efficiency, helps ensure accuracy and is well liked by our finance team," said Don Seibel, Chief Financial Officer of FBL Financial Group, a public insurance company that manages more than $9 billion in assets. After its initial use for SEC filings, FBL Financial adopted Wdesk for investor relations, Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA) and internal management reports.
"Because of the value added, Wdesk use is spreading throughout our company for preparing other risk, regulatory and internal documents," added Seibel.
Another large public insurance company saved over $200,000 when preparing their SEC Form N-4 registration statement for variable annuity contracts. With Wdesk, they cut their document preparation and review time by 75 percent and gained back more than 1,000 hours for value-added work. They also developed a more efficient, accurate statutory reporting process.
American Enterprise Group, a privately held insurance company, started using Wdesk to produce internal management reports and presentations. Soon thereafter, the company adopted Wdesk to create its annual statutory footnotes and audit reports. The efficiencies, control and transparency gained with Wdesk enabled American Enterprise to further expand Wdesk use for its Model Audit Rule (MAR) compliance that involves 13 business processes and 55 control owners.
MAR compliance, which is similar to Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance, includes testing and certifying controls, making quarterly presentations to audit and risk committees and filing annual reports.
"We were able to set up a risk control matrix in Wdesk, so each control owner was clear about the control and the risk associated with that control," said Steve Wilson, Director of Internal Audit and Risk Management at American Enterprise. "We're a lot more efficient. It looks better, it gives us a better process and it's a lot easier to visualize what we're doing because it's there in front of you."
"All of these reports are linked together," said Sara Lehan, Assistant Vice President of Financial Reporting at American Enterprise. "The more of these reports we can pull into Wdesk, the more synergies we get and the more effectively we're able to use our time."
Real-time collaboration in a controlled, data-linked environment is among the reasons why Workiva was recently recognized as one of the Top 10 Risk Management Solution Providers by Insurance CIO Outlook Magazine. "Workiva continued to break new ground within the past year, benefiting its customers," said Pamela Morgan, Managing Editor of Insurance CIO Outlook. "We are happy to showcase Workiva this year due to its continuing excellence in delivering top-notch, technology-driven solutions."
About Workiva
Workiva (NYSE:WK) created Wdesk, a cloud-based productivity platform used by thousands of enterprises to collect, link, report and analyze business data with control and accountability. The platform's proprietary word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications are integrated and built upon a data management engine, offering synchronized data, controlled collaboration, granular permissions and a full audit trail. Wdesk helps mitigate enterprise risk, improve productivity and give users confidence to make decisions with real-time data. Workiva employs more than 1,200 people with offices in 16 cities. The company is headquartered in Ames, Iowa. For more information, visit workiva.com.