Closing the Books in One Day

How a Life and Annuity Insurer Rebuilt Its Investment Accounting Close on Governed AI

Executive Summary

A large life and annuity insurer replaced a manual, spreadsheet-bound monthly investment accounting close with a governed, auditable pipeline built on Palantir Foundry and AIP, delivered by Andersen Consulting's AI and Advanced Analytics practice. A five-person senior team compressed a three-day reconciliation and journal preparation cycle to a single business day, eliminated the recurring post-close remediation that followed sign-off each month, and gave the finance function a fully traceable path from raw custodian data to posted journal entries. During a single measured close cycle after go-live, the pipeline produced a journal-entry-ready output with exception flags in under eight processing hours, demonstrating the immediate value of Andersen Consulting's applied AI approach and establishing a repeatable foundation for continuous close across the finance organization.

Introduction: Context and Challenge

Across the Industry

Insurers face rising pressure to close faster and report with greater accuracy while statutory complexity, portfolio scale, and auditor scrutiny keep increasing. Legacy close processes built on linked workbooks and manual reconciliation cannot keep pace, and they concentrate institutional knowledge in a handful of people whose absence creates real reporting risk.

The Client’s Challenge

The insurer's monthly investment accounting reconciliation for its two largest portfolios required roughly three combined business days of analyst and reviewer effort per cycle. The work ran through manually relinked Excel workbooks fed by custodian extracts and general ledger pulls, covering interest maintenance reserve and asset valuation reserve reconciliation, portfolio-level amortization, and journal entry preparation. The process was fragile. Missed accounts and portfolios regularly survived initial sign-off and forced two or more additional days of post-booking remediation. Each late correction threatened the statutory close calendar, consumed senior reviewer time, and eroded confidence in numbers the business depended on. The finance team knew the process could not scale as portfolios grew, and the risk of a material misstatement rose with every manual relink.

Solution: AI-Assisted Financial Close Built on Palantir Foundry and AIP

Approach Overview

Andersen Consulting mobilized a lean, senior team and began with an on-site discovery period that mapped the end-to-end close workflow directly alongside the people who ran it. The team treated the close as a set of financial decisions rather than a technology project. The goal was not to digitize the spreadsheets but to rebuild the flow so that every number could be traced, every exception could be caught before sign-off, and the monthly cycle could complete in a single automated run. The solution let the finance function shift its effort from assembling data to reviewing exceptions and exercising judgment.

Data Integration and Foundation

Palantir Foundry unified the custodian valuation extracts and general ledger data into a single governed layer with completeness validation against the ledger. Where the old process depended on analysts manually relinking source files each month, the pipeline ingests raw extracts, checks them for missing portfolios and accounts, and enforces a consistent structure aligned to statutory reporting. Data lineage is preserved from raw ingestion through every transformation step, so finance and audit can follow any figure back to its source. Accuracy and consistency are built into the foundation rather than reconstructed by hand each cycle.

AI and Insight Generation

AIP applied automated reconciliation and amortization logic across portfolios, then used exception-based detection to surface reconciliation breaks, missing portfolios, and newly added portfolios for human review before any ledger extract was prepared. Every output carried an audit trail from raw data through each transformation to the posted journal. The approach was deliberately deterministic. No conclusion rested on inferred logic, and every amortization result and journal entry could be traced through driver-based calculations to the underlying data. As a concrete example, when a newly onboarded portfolio appeared in the custodian feed but had no matching amortization schedule, the pipeline flagged it as an exception and routed it for approval rather than silently omitting it, catching the exact class of error that had previously triggered days of post-close remediation.

User Experience and Workflow Integration

The finance team works from a single exception queue instead of a stack of workbooks. Reconciliation breaks and additions arrive already identified, with the supporting detail attached, so reviewers spend their time deciding rather than searching. Because the pipeline mirrors the logic the team already understood, adoption was immediate and required no change to how the close calendar operates. Analysts approve or correct flagged items, and the system generates the journal-entry-ready output on a single overnight run

Rapid Implementation

Andersen Consulting delivered the automation as part of a focused engagement staffed by a five-person senior team of a strategic advisor, engagement leadership, and dedicated Foundry and AIP forward-deployed engineers. Delivery ran in weeks, not quarters. The team used Andersen Consulting's own Palantir enrollment so the client carried no platform license cost and paid only for implementation and metered consumption. Work was validated against real historical close data before cutover, and the outcome was measured over one full monthly close cycle following production go-live

Results and Impact

The engagement turned a fragile, multi-day manual close into a governed one-day process that the finance function trusts.

• Faster Close: Monthly investment accounting reconciliation and journal preparation dropped from roughly three combined business days to a single business day, with the measured cycle completing in under eight processing hours.
• Remediation Eliminated: Exception-based detection catches missing portfolios and accounts before sign-off, removing the two-plus days of post-booking remediation that recurred every month.
• Full Auditability: Every posted journal entry traces through each transformation step back to raw custodian and ledger data, strengthening statutory reporting and audit readiness.
• Reduced Key-Person Risk: Close logic now lives in a governed pipeline rather than in individual workbooks and the people who maintained them, protecting the reporting calendar.
• Reviewer Capacity Freed: Senior finance staff moved from assembling and relinking data to reviewing exceptions and exercising judgment, raising both throughput and quality.

Together these outcomes gave the insurer a faster, more reliable close and a platform it can extend to additional portfolios and downstream statutory and actuarial consumers.

A New Standard for Monthly Close

The result reflects a genuine partnership in which human judgment and governed AI reinforce each other. The finance function did not hand its close to a black box. It gained a transparent system that does the mechanical assembly and surfaces the decisions that still need a person. "We used to spend the first week of every month rebuilding the same reconciliation and then chasing what we missed," said the insurer's Head of Investment Accounting. "Now the system does the assembly and shows us exactly what needs attention. We close in a day and we trust the number."

Looking Ahead

The insurer plans to extend the pipeline beyond its two largest portfolios and to feed the governed outputs directly into statutory reporting and actuarial workflows. Andersen Consulting is supporting the next phase with adoption and change management alongside further automation, moving the finance function toward a continuous, AI-enabled close where exceptions are surfaced in near real time rather than discovered at month-end.

Deliver Value to Your Organization with AI in Weeks, not Years

Andersen Consulting is a global consulting practice providing a comprehensive suite of services spanning corporate strategy, business, technology, AI transformation, and human capital solutions. Andersen Consulting integrates with the multidimensional service model of Andersen’s global platform, delivering world-class consulting, tax, legal, valuation, global mobility, and advisory expertise.