Cash sits waiting. Premiums have been allocated, insurers are ready to settle, but finance teams are still chasing mismatches across spreadsheets and email chains.

In the Lloyd's market, where multinational risk means cash flows through multiple geographies, currencies and insurers, global settlement has become one of the most critical, and often most painful, processes to get right.

What global settlement actually means

Global settlement is the process of reconciling and distributing premiums across geographies, insurers and currencies. It's where policy data, payment data and regulatory requirements all need to align before cash can move.

Consider a single premium payment from a UK broker covering risks in three territories. Before that cash can settle:

• LPANs need validation and agreement from brokers
• Premium splits must be applied correctly across insurers
• Three different FX rates need reconciliation
• Trust and bank accounts need to balance across all countries

 

One mismatched rate and the entire settlement stalls as someone tries to find where the numbers went wrong.

Settlement is hard to scale

As a business grows, manual processes that worked for hundreds of policies break under thousands. The default response has been to hire more people in house, or contract offshore support. This spreads the same broken processes across more hands.

The real problem isn't just manual work - it's fragmented systems. You can automate reconciliation, but if your trust accounts don't balance, your BDX reports are incomplete, or your trial balance doesn't close, you've only solved part of the problem.

Why end-to-end  platforms are more effective

Simple automation tools can match payments to policies but they can't:

• Balance trust accounts across multiple jurisdictions
• Generate compliant BDX reports
• Produce trial balance and balance sheet reports
• Provide near real-time visibility into your complete financial position
  
  

An end-to-end insurance accounting platform solves the whole problem. It connects premium allocation, payment reconciliation, claims, trust accounting and financial reporting in one system. When cash moves, everything updates automatically and accurately across every geography and insurer.

What a complete platform delivers

1. A central insurance accounting hub. Policy data, payment data, trust balances and statutory reports all live in the same platform. No re-keying between systems, no version control issues.
2. Time back for your finance team. The platform handles the majority of transactions that reconcile perfectly, so finance teams can focus on the ~5% with genuine complexity that need attention.
3. Real-time financial control. Dashboards show what's been received, allocated, settled and outstanding, across all entities, currencies and insurers. Trust accounts balance. BDX reports generate on demand. Month-end close runs in days, not weeks.

Real world results

Syndicates and insurers who've moved to complete insurance accounting platforms have:

• Cut settlement cycles by 75% or more
• Reduced unallocated cash to below KPI targets
• Shrunk month-end close from weeks to days
• Freed finance teams to focus on strategic work instead of firefighting errors

"For us, Grappler means scale. It enables us to work seamlessly across New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore as we grow." - Jordan Urry, CFO, Delta Insurance

Final thoughts

The question you should be asking is not "how do we keep up?" but rather "how do we get ahead?" A complete insurance accounting platform transforms your finance operations, so finance teams stop firefighting errors and start enabling business growth.