Many insurers relying on stale information to manage risks; study finds

Many insurers manage risk using stale, outdated reports and information, a study by the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit found.
In 2008 Q4 and 2009 Q1, the EIU surveyed 446 senior executives from 10 industries around the world about their views on the financial processes that support governance, risk and compliance. Of this total, 58 came from the insurance industry.
Few companies can produce accurate, near-real-time information to support decision-making, and fewer still have mastered scenario analysis and regular risk stress testing, suggests the report Strengthening governance, risk and compliance in the insurance industry.
The biggest benefits insurers hope to gain from standardizing and automating financial processes are improving data accuracy, eliminating error-prone manual processes, giving staff more time to focus on more valuable activities and making speedier decisions, the study found.
While 24% of executives cited cost reduction as a key advantage, it ranked fifth overall. More than double that proportion highlighted data accuracy and integrity instead, it continued.
Efforts to automate processes involve problems and risks of their own, many respondents said.
Almost half of respondents cited cost as a barrier to standardization and automation, and 28% cited the difficulty of obtaining approval from independent-minded executives across regions and business lines.