Life Act Reporting
Thursday, 23 July 2026
We have been working with Australia’s leading life insurers for more than two decades. Using Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform, we enabled workforce planning, project forecasting, service company budgeting & forecasting, vendor analysis & planning, as well as management, statutory and narrative reporting. All of the above was achieved in close collaboration with the various parts of the respective finance teams.
Life Act reporting solution
Our most recent life insurance engagement entailed the automation of Life Act reporting - a responsibility predominantly met by actuaries utilising a complex web of Excel spreadsheets. The compilation of these spreadsheets is largely manual, and their ultimate output is often difficult to reconcile with the general ledger, yet absolutely critical to withstand regulatory scrutiny.
It would be natural to point to process efficiencies, a shortened reporting cycle, automation and alignment with the general ledger as the project’s biggest achievements, yet to us, the real shift was that actuarial and finance teams now share a single source of truth — not two versions of the truth that had to be reconciled after the fact.
Data granularity challenges & principles
To satisfy Life Act reporting requirements, data is required at a level of granularity not available within the general ledger. Complementary data sources are needed to enable reporting at product / PRE-pool level and to split participating product data into VSA (value of supporting asset), PRP (policyholder retained profit), SRP (shareholder retained profit), and policyholder and shareholder GSP (global sharing pool) components. These complementary data sources included the subledger, actuarial modelling tool (here, FIS Prophet), and reports provided by the custodian / asset manager for investment data.
The important assumption is that the granular data imported from additional data sources already exists in a less granular form in the general ledger or constitutes a transfer of data across components. In both cases, there must be two sides of the entry netting to zero (and thus not changing the general ledger totals).
This principle was upheld for both the Life Act P&L (more akin to a cashflow statement - opening balance, net cashflow, transfers, closing balance) and the balance sheet. The closing balance of the Life Act P&L flows as insurance contract liability into the balance sheet. An IFRS 17 to Life Act 'walk' was built to explain any balance sheet differences between the two reporting standards.
Once all source data is available, the automated data load, followed by the execution of the P&L and balance sheet business rules, delivers draft reporting outputs within minutes. Subsequent reviews with an ability to record manual adjustments (automatically captured in a change log) provide the final reporting artefacts shortly after.
Why this matters for life insurers
Life Act reporting sits at an uncomfortable intersection — actuarial complexity meets finance discipline meets regulatory deadline. Most insurers manage this intersection with manual bridges: exports, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge held by a handful of people. That approach doesn't scale, and it doesn't survive staff turnover, model changes, or regulatory shifts particularly well.
What this engagement demonstrates is that Oracle EPM can be the platform that removes the bridge entirely —not by simplifying actuarial complexity, but by giving it a proper home within the same system finance already uses to close the books and report.
For life insurers still managing this process through spreadsheets and email chains, the question worth asking isn't whether a platform like this could work — it's how much manual work and reconciliation effort remain acceptable as business as usual.
Get in touch
If you are interested in how this could apply to your Life Act or broader actuarial - finance integration challenges, please get in touch. We enable meaningful insights into all aspects of business performance.
