Month end is a time-sensitive period but with Aurum we can maximise our time and move smoothly through closing our books.

Launching in 2018 with the backing of Berkshire Hathway, Rostella got off to a quick start in the motor insurance space. Being an ambitious company, they didn’t want their growth to stall though. Soon, onboarding additional insurers, offering new products, and acquiring more customers therefore became a priority. In turn, so did the efficiencies of their financial back-office if they were to cope with growing complexities and transactional volumes.  

The solution  

Motor insurance remains Rostella’s primary offering with an expansion into other areas on the horizon. Evidently, their financial processes have to be adept at adapting to change and absorbing growth. Consequently, continuing to conduct reconciliation manually was not an option.  

This was especially true given that Rostella’s finance team is purposefully lean. Consisting of just two people – Rhys McCarthy, Head of Finance, and Fiona Mackechnie, Assistant Accountant –  the reality was that for the business, their time was best spent predominantly elsewhere on value-adding tasks.  

Having our Head of Finance spend lots of their time playing with spreadsheets in Excel isn’t productive nor adding value to the business. It got to the point where we knew that we either had to recruit or bring in some sort of reconciliation system. ‍

Fiona Mackechnie, Assistant Accountant, Rostella

The business case therefore presented itself for Rostella to adopt automated reconciliation software. Which software they wanted to use also presented itself with ease. Having been users of Aurum whilst at Admiral, both Rhys and Fiona were well aware of the benefits that it would bring to Rostella.  

It was a joke at first, the amount of times we would say to each other, “we wouldn’t have this problem with Aurum, it would get this done in seconds,” but then it became frustrating. We knew that Aurum was the reconciliation software that we wanted, we just had to get approval for it.

‍Fiona Mackechnie, Assistant Accountant, Rostella

Nevertheless, they rightly had to conduct due diligence on alternative pieces of software and present their findings to the Rostella board. Based on flexibility, scalability, cost, and a proven support team, they chose Aurum.  

The results  

The adoption of Aurum came for Rostella at a crucial time. After all, Rhys was having to spend a week every month on producing reports, and with them considering onboarding extra insurers, even more of his time was likely to be used up on this activity. However, with Aurum in place, Rhys was able to reclaim his time over the crucial period of month end.  

Another monthly activity that they’ve saved time on is their insurance statement reconciliation; a task they must complete before Rhys sends money across to their insurers. For this activity alone, Rostella saves 4.5 working days every month thanks to a combination of Aurum’s powerful auto-matching and its ability to clearly present outstanding items collectively straight away; previously the team would only become aware of exceptions on point of discovery.  

Month end is a time-sensitive period but with Aurum we can maximise our time and move smoothly through closing our books. ‍

Rhys McCarthy, Head of Finance, Rostella

Better visibility of exceptions not only helps the finance team within Rostella though, it also benefits their customers. For example, by automating their premiums reconciliation through Aurum, Rostella is alerted instantly to any discrepancies between their back office and their bank statements. This means that should a payment be falsely flagged as ‘failed’ when it has actually been banked by Rostella, Fiona can amend this mistake before any incorrect communication is sent out to a customer.  

Automating our premiums reconciliation with Aurum, we can see straight away why something hasn’t reconciled meaning that we can resolve issues before they become a customer-impacting issue. It’s nice to know that there’s a clear link between our back-office work and improving the customer experience. ‍

Fiona Mackechnie Assistant Accountant, Rostella

Whilst customers are a number one priority for all businesses, for the likes of Rostella who are overseen by the FCA, it should be noted that regulators are another incredibly important stakeholder. In fact, the CASS 5 regulations that Rostella must abide by concern both regulators and customers due to it ensuring the safeguarding of client money.  

Rostella achieves this by segregating client monies from their own business funds. However, to achieve compliance they must prove that they are in fact taking this action. This could have been achieved with an additional hire manually conducting reconciliation; however, Rhys was aware that this was not best practice in the eyes of the FCA due to the fact that human errors can occur, and no audit trails would be produced. Fortunately, with Aurum accurately detailing how many payments they have received from customers and facilitating automatic reconciliation against client money accounts, the finance team at Rostella are able to prove they have ringfenced the correct amount in no time at all.  

In Aurum we have set up separate accounts for everything, making it really clear for us and auditors what transactions are related to – whether that is client monies or something else – and that we’re following all regulations. ‍

Fiona Mackechnie Assistant Accountant, Rostella

Although Aurum allows Rostella to showcase to regulators every historic action taken in relation to transactions, it is also valued as a tool which will serve the business in the future.  

The beauty of Aurum is that we can add more accounts, and the time spent on reconciliation won’t increase. Aurum can take on more data files and higher volumes, and continue to deliver outputs at speed.

Rhys McCarthy, Head of Finance, Rostella

After all, how Rhys and Fiona appealed to Rostella’s Directors was that the cost of Aurum per annum compared to having to hire additional resources was much lower, meaning that investment in Aurum matched Rostella’s aim of keeping their overhead costs low.  

The capacity we now have to grow without having to increase expenditure in our team is all down to Aurum.‍

Rhys McCarthy, Head of Finance, Rostella

Overall, with the business’ needs met by Aurum, on a day-to-day basis it importantly also satisfies the end users in Rhys and Fiona. They had a great experience of Aurum scaling up to assist Admiral, a large FTSE company, in passing numerous audits and now they are once more making the most of Aurum’s financial controls at Rostella.  

We were passionate about introducing Aurum to Rostella; we knew Aurum would do the job, and it’s done exactly that.

‍Fiona Mackechnie, Assistant Accountant, Rostella