Legal & General reduces its reporting time by 40% with Anaplan

Hear how Legal & General reduced reporting time by 40% and eased financial planning burdens with Anaplan’s financial planning software.

The breadth and depth of financial data that businesses need to monitor and report on continues to grow. Many businesses are realizing it’s finally time to ditch the traditional spreadsheets approach—which is cumbersome and limited for complex planning and reporting and turn to a financial planning system. Specifically in highly regulated industries like insurance and healthcare, organizations have massive amounts of sensitive data that cannot be risked by being managed in non-secure and error-prone spreadsheets.

Founded in 1836, Legal & General is a British multinational finance service company specializing in life insurance, general insurance, pensions, and investments. Andrew Price, Group Financial Controller at Legal & General, met with Financial Times last week to discuss how Anaplan has transformed the way they plan and report financial results.

“[Anaplan has] been a huge benefit for us. Increased flexibility. Increased speed. We’ve managed to improve our reporting times to about 40%. We’ve got about 1.65 billion cells of data—I counted this morning—that we currently use. [Anaplan has] been massive. We would have never been able to do that on a spreadsheet or any of the older tools,” said Price.

Over the last three years with a shifted investment in cloud technologies, including Anaplan, the Legal & General finance team has become more agile, flexible, and responsive to the business, with increased access and visibility into real-time financial information.

“The amount of data that we have to go through—whether that’s just capturing data by each fund…whether that’s looking at the whole of the asset management industry—it’s enormous. I think that people [in our industry] at the moment still heavily are reliant on the old desktop solutions, and by putting something into the cloud, it would be a huge benefit.”

Anaplan insight: Organizations that are moving their financial planning and reporting to a cloud solution like Anaplan are adding substantial value to the executive level by delivering real-time insight into the health and performance of the business. Read more about Anaplan’s industry-specific solution for Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting for Insurance.