MGA Achieves up to 75x Faster Financial Reporting in 5 Weeks

About Our Client

The Client is an EU-based managing general agent (MGA) that has been in the insurance brokerage and underwriting business for 70+ years. The company focuses on commercial and residential property insurance, including general and professional liability lines for the engineering & construction, retail, and hospitality industries.

Legacy System Failed to Support Quick and Accurate Reporting

The Client used to rely on its WordPress-based custom insurance software to automate financial reporting tasks. As the volume of the Client’s data and workflows grew, the system started experiencing performance issues, which resulted in frequent reporting errors and delays. The solution required urgent troubleshooting to prevent operational bottlenecks and avoid risks of financial misplanning due to late reports and flawed data.

The Client previously engaged ScienceSoft to audit its legacy insurance software, evaluate system modernization potential, and suggest feasible revamp strategies. During the audit, our team identified the opportunity to upgrade the financial reporting module for quicker report generation without major system overhauls. To confirm the value of the proposed fixes, the team delivered a proof of concept (PoC) and tested it on several reports that often faced delays. After the changes were introduced in a test environment, the reports showed a 2–75x increase in generation speed. The Client was impressed with the results and asked ScienceSoft to launch the improvements to users and expand them to other financial reports.

Financial Reporting Module Revamped in 5 Weeks

To fully revamp the reporting module, ScienceSoft composed a team of a project manager, an insurance IT consultant, three PHP developers, and a database engineer experienced in building custom insurance accounting software. Our project manager suggested applying the Kanban methodology with daily calls to speed up planning under tight deadlines and get frequent updates. The project manager continued to scope and triage the backlog throughout the project to drive always-on delivery.

When auditing the Client’s legacy system, ScienceSoft revealed that the system relied on dated WordPress plugins and inefficient querying and caching techniques for financial report generation. This resulted in a high server load and prolonged data processing. The poorly designed structure of the Client’s SQL database and a lack of database indexes further degraded reporting module performance.

To fit the Client’s limited budget and address the urgent need for stabilization, ScienceSoft prioritized the remediation steps that were quick and affordable to implement. Our PHP developers and database engineer collaborated closely on introducing the following improvements at the codebase and database levels:

• Removing the middle layer (WordPress plugins) in financial report generation.
• Creating custom SQL queries for retrieving report-relevant financial data directly from the database.
• Adjusting data aggregation flows to partially transfer the load from the insurance software back end to the database.
• Refactoring the field auto-population code to accelerate the process and prevent reporting errors.
• Optimizing the database structure and implementing database indexing to speed up financial data search and intake.

ScienceSoft ran functional, regression, and performance tests in parallel with coding to ensure that new code pieces performed as intended and did not affect the accuracy of reports.

After completing the revamp, ScienceSoft’s team shared the technical documentation for the revamped financial reporting module to make it easier for the Client to maintain and further evolve the solution.

Up to 75x Faster Financial Reporting Without a Major System Rebuild

In just five weeks, the Client got the new automated reporting capabilities rolled out across all major types of its financial reports, including:

• Operating cash flow reports.
• Insurance broker commission reports.
• Insurance agent commission reports.
• Insured debt reports.
• Monthly close reports.
• Reconciliation reports.

ScienceSoft’s advice on the pragmatic revamp strategy helped the company minimize project investments while ensuring high-quality deliverables. Thanks to the improvements introduced by our team, the Client now benefits from up to 75x quicker financial reporting and higher productivity of its accounting specialists.

Inspired by the success of the financial reporting module revamp, the Client involved ScienceSoft in upgrading the quoting and policy management functionality of its software.

Technologies and Tools

PHP, WordPress, MySQL, Confluence.