TeamMate+ Helps Americo Deliver Nearly 100% Auditor Utilization
For Kim Beckley and her two-person internal audit team, efficiency is everything. As Director of Internal Audit at Americo Financial Life and Annuity Insurance Company (hereinafter “Americo”), Beckley runs a lean operation – close to 100% auditor utilization. Not an easy task as internal audit grows increasingly complex and stakeholder expectations remain high.
Technology plays an integral role in helping Beckley’s internal audit team meet their performance standards. In 2018, Internal Audit replaced its manual processes with TeamMate+, Wolters Kluwer’s fully configurable, web-based audit and assurance management expert solution. During implementation, TeamMate+’s business process experts partnered with Beckley to reevaluate their existing audit methodology and determine where improvements might be made to better streamline audit processes and maximize efficiency.
For Americo, one of the most impactful gains in efficiency centered around its external auditing process. When external auditors or insurance examiners need to review Americo’s internal audit documentation, Beckley spends about 30 minutes setting up their credentials in TeamMate+ to give them “read only” access to the data they need, which then enables external auditors to either log in remotely or work onsite. Because TeamMate+ is so intuitive to use, once the external auditors are set up in the audit system, they typically require little to no assistance from Beckley.
“Before TeamMate+, everything was stored on our network drive, which we couldn’t give our external auditors or insurance reviewers access to. That limitation required us to download all of the information they requested and securely transfer it to them, which took a tremendous amount of time,” said Beckley.