How a Leading Life Insurer Built Audit-Ready IFRS 17 Compliance in Excel

As one of the world’s largest insurance and asset management companies, with operations in over 70 countries, their U.S. Life division provides a range of retirement, annuity, and insurance products through independent distribution channels.

Like many large insurers, this company relies on deep actuarial expertise to power its business. In the U.S., life insurance operates under complex regulatory environments and ledger entries—including calculations required for IFRS 17 compliance. As regulatory expectations grow, so does the need for transparency, repeatability, and governance in these critical workflows.

The insurer's U.S. life actuarial team previously generated IFRS 17 ledger entries using spreadsheets built with VBA macros. These spreadsheets pulled data from internal systems, ran calculations, and posted results to the ledger manually.

While this worked from a functional standpoint, it lacked version control, audit traceability, and approval workflows. The team had no easy way to show auditors what data was used, what logic was applied, or when changes were made.

After auditors raised concerns about the lack of visibility into data and logic used, the insurer sought a more governed, traceable workflow. The solution had to provide clear lineage of inputs, logic, and outputs—without adding IT overhead or disrupting the team’s core spreadsheet processes.

The insurer chose Coherent Spark to modernize their spreadsheet-based IFRS 17 workflows, introducing structure, audit readiness, and end-to-end traceability to spreadsheet logic. All while letting the actuarial team stay in control and stay in Excel.

Working without IT involvement, business users rebuilt five ledger entry workflows using a governance-first framework. Spark’s audit logging now tracks every input, formula, and output, allowing auditors to clearly validate how each result was produced. Permission controls and approval workflows ensure that only vetted logic can be deployed to production.

By centralizing logic outside the spreadsheet and standardizing actuarial processes, Spark gives the insurer's actuarial and IT teams both consistency and control.

Auditors have reviewed the Spark-enabled workflows and provided positive feedback on their structure and transparency. With that validation, the insurer plans to expand Spark to support at least 20 actuarial use cases. The team is also exploring additional use cases—including using Spark to test and validate system-based calculations at scale.

This success shows how insurers can build lasting control around the spreadsheets that power their business. What started as an IFRS 17 initiative has become a foundation for enterprise-wide EUC governance—one that combines transparency, structure, and speed.

With Coherent, actuarial teams stay in Excel while meeting the same standards of traceability and auditability expected across regulated systems. Each workflow now runs with built-in versioning and approval, giving the business a model that scales across product, finance, and risk.

For insurers everywhere, this represents a new phase of governance: continuous, connected, and business-led. Coherent’s platform enables that shift—bringing consistency to the logic that drives decisions, and control that grows with the organization.