Scouting for Growth Yandy Plasencia: Data Reconciliation for the CFO
On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yandy Plasencia, founder and CEO of DataHaven Software.
In today’s conversation we talk about Yandy’s journey and vision as well as how mid-sized insurance companies can explore and empower their finance teams, especially their CFOs, by automating data reconciliation and unlocking real-time insights.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- For the most part, it all comes down to the basic leger/sub-ledger challenge. The core systems are transactional and have all the information of what took place, what payments were paid out, when a claim came in, what took place and everything to verify a claim has coverage within the rules defined by the policy. If the data isn’t easy to extract so it’s digestible and consumable by the right audience then it will be challenging for that audience to interpret the data, reconcile it and do it in a timely fashion.
- In smaller sized carriers there will be more technical folks who are not necessarily business folks, there’s always a gap between what the business and technology folks are looking for and, although technology does a very good job of getting the data where it needs to go, it doesn’t always meet the needs of the finance and accounting folks. There an ongoing friction between both departments.
- You need to build an intelligence layer with well-defined relationships across every single data point as it pertains to financials. If it affects financials you need to have a relationship or ontology or something that tells you how these data points are interrelated. If you don’t have that then it’s only creating a problem for something else that’s going to come up very soon.
- The main issue with spreadsheets with visualisation tools is that those tools solve the problem short term until they don’t, they are extremely helpful until they become painful and they become a bottleneck for the organisation to grow eventually. The tools don’t have change processes in place as data sets get larger and as organisations grow. They also become a personnel risk because only 1 or 2 people in the company understand it.
BEST MOMENTS
‘Data is a powerful tool, and it’s “make it or break it” for a lot of companies, especially in insurance where the devil is in the details.’
‘Being able to trace an expense back to the root system and getting a full transactional detail for that specific number is the most reliable way to do something.’
‘It’s only labour intensive if you try to do this completely manually and you don’t leverage artificial intelligence in the right ways, and if you don’t have a defined framework to do this, if you do, it’s much easier.’
‘It’s not rocket science… it’s just data science.’
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Yandy Plasencia is a visionary entrepreneur and software architect with deep expertise in AI, data engineering, insurance technology, and regulatory compliance.
At DataHaven, Yandy and his team are creating an insurance-specific intelligence layer that automates reconciliation, accelerates financial analysis, and helps leadership trace changes in loss or expense ratios directly to operational events.
ABOUT THE HOST
Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.
This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/