Fidelity Life maintains growth and market competitiveness with ExFlow.

Fidelity Life, the country’s largest locally owned life insurer, protects New Zealanders’ way of life by offering a range of insurance products to individual, business and rural customers. With evolving consumer and regulatory expectations and rising claims costs, the industry is facing some big challenges.

Fidelity Life is tackling there challenges head-on with an ambitious customer-led transformation strategy that aims to reimagine life insurance for New Zealanders. A key transformation project includes completing the successful acquisition and integration of Westpac Life from Westpac Group with, amongst other things, the same number of AP staff

SHEDDING A MANUAL AP PROCESS

In 2019 Fidelity Life launched Project Watson, a programme to develop the brand new technology platform that will underpin the company’s broader transformation. Once completed, the new platform will streamline administrative processes, reduce operating costs, lift productivity and ultimately help Fidelity Life become more competitive. As part of this project, Datacom helped Fidelity Life move from Microsoft Dynamics (GP) to Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&O, and recommended ExFlow as the best AP solution for F&O.

“AP was a pain point for us, not just in finance, but in terms of the time consumed by all our stakeholders who could never see the invoices once paid and filed away. Using ExFlow, where everybody can see and look up a PDF invoice for each transaction, hasreally been a life changing experience.”

Lily Huang, Financial Reporting Manager at Fidelity Life

PHASE ONE: COMPLETE

ExFlow was implemented as part of the General Ledger phase of Project Watson, with over 3,000 vendors successfully migrated to D365 FO. Jay Patel, Head of Finance at Fidelity Life explains: “we had a very paper based approach before the COVID-19 lockdown. The lockdown made AP automation more important than ever.”

Fidelity Life implemented ExFlow for Microsoft D365 Finance & Operations and ExFlow Data Capture and:

• Increased efficiency and overall cost control
• Got automatic regulatory compliance
• Reduced paper-based systems

NOT JUST AP AUTOMATION

In addition to the time and cost saving benefits that AP automation provides, Fidelity Life has reported significant improvements with financial control since going live with ExFlow in 2021.

ExFlow’s ability to match GST numbers and bank account details on supplier invoices with existing vendor details has given confidence to their business. Preventing fraudulent invoices from being processed has been particularly important during COVID-19, where the risks of opportunistic fraud and corruption have become more prevalent.

Financial control has also been improved through ExFlow’s approval process, with fast and accurate routing of invoices to budget holders based on their approved delegation of authority limits, ensuring suppliers are always paid on time.

“We now have confidence that what an employee has approved is within their limits without having to check manually at an individual invoice level.”

Lily Huang, Financial Reporting Manager at Fidelity Life

FROM AN ACCOUNTING PERSPECTIVE

ExFlow has also helped improve cash flow. Prior to using ExFlow, Fidelity Life was only able to claim GST on invoices once they had been manually processed, as that was the earliest point the invoice entered the system. With ExFlow invoices now enter the system as soon as they are received, allowing GST to be claimed much sooner without having to rely on time consuming manual processes previously performed by AP staff.