Most insurers don’t struggle with spreadsheets—they struggle with seeing them. Closing the EUC visibility gap requires moving from manual inventory to dynamic observability, targeted governance, and business enablement.
Enterprise spreadsheet use in insurance has exploded. But the methods used to manage it haven’t evolved at the same pace.
What once meant a handful of financial and actuarial workbooks now includes hundreds—sometimes thousands—of end-user computing (EUC) assets: Excel models, Access databases, and custom-built tools operating outside core IT systems.
For insurance, risk, and compliance leaders, this creates three persistent challenges:
At Coherent, we’ve worked with insurers facing this exact challenge.
Leading insurers aren’t trying to control every spreadsheet equally. They’re maturing how they understand and evolve their EUC environments.
Here’s how they do it:
The first step in EUC management is discovery—building a reliable, dynamic inventory of your spreadsheets.
Every EUC initiative starts with a deceptively simple question:
What do we actually have?
Most insurers begin with self-reporting. Business teams identify spreadsheets they believe qualify as EUCs, and Risk or IT builds a central inventory.
It’s a logical starting point.
You can’t govern what you can’t see.
But static inventories rarely hold up. They’re often incomplete the moment they’re created.
Common issues include:
Mature programs move beyond inventory toward observability—a dynamic, data-driven view of the spreadsheet environment.
With observability, insurers can answer questions that matter:
These answers can’t be produced manually. They require automated scanning and analysis at scale.
How Coherent helps:
Coherent Insights scans spreadsheet environments to surface dependencies, risks, and data flows—giving insurers reliable visibility into where critical logic lives and how it’s used.
This kind of visibility isn’t about creating a perfect inventory. It’s about building a reliable, data-driven map of where critical business logic lives and what risks it carries.
Once visibility improves, the next step is governance and applying the right level of control to the right files. This is often where EUC programs stall.
A common response is to apply the same control framework to every spreadsheet. In practice, that means evaluating hundreds of files against dozens—or hundreds—of controls.
But that one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t reflect how different these models really are.
Some spreadsheets feed core financials. Others handle routine workflows. Treating them all the same adds complexity without reducing risk.
Leading insurers focus on prioritized control, not blanket enforcement:
Without this kind of focus, governance becomes overwhelming. Business owners get bogged down in checklists. Risk teams lose time chasing low-value work. And trust in the program erodes.
Control should reinforce confidence, not create drag.
How Coherent helps:
Coherent Control dynamically classifies spreadsheets, embeds governance directly into Excel workflows, and aligns controls with enterprise audit standards—without forcing rewrites or code migrations.
Done right, this stage turns governance into a source of clarity.
The final stage is empowerment—giving business users speed and autonomy without sacrificing oversight.
Too often, EUC oversight becomes a burden placed squarely on business users. They’re asked to document, attest, review, and support audits on top of their actual jobs. At the same time, pulling spreadsheets away from the business isn’t realistic. Teams use Excel for a reason: it lets them move fast.
Mature programs reduce effort without reducing control by:
For the most critical EUCs, transformation leaders take it further: they convert spreadsheet logic into governed, API-ready services that can be reused across business lines.
Excel stays part of the process. But now it’s backed by versioning, observability, and integration.
How Coherent helps:
Coherent Spark converts spreadsheet logic into governed APIs, making it reusable across policy systems, underwriting tools, broker portals, and internal workflows.
Business users keep flexibility.
Risk and IT gain control.
The organization moves faster with fewer surprises.
Whether you’re early in discovery or under regulatory pressure, the EUC challenge isn’t unique to your organization.
What separates leaders is how they mature:
Coherent’s automation and intelligence platform supports every step of this journey—helping insurers understand their EUCs, govern what matters, and empower the business without compromise.
Let’s bring clarity to your spreadsheet environment—and put control back in your hands.