General
Job description and person specification
Job Title:Accounts Receivable Analyst – 9 months FTC
Location: Birmingham office - 2 days PW
Key Relationships: Internal: Underwriting, Claims, Finance, UK & RoW Operations teams, Digital Operations teams, Digital Services Team, IT, Agresso Support, AR Support team and Broker Relations
External: Brokers, 3rd Party service providers and external credit controllers
Job Summary:
Ownership of open debt, collections and cash allocation including:
- Daily credit control processing;
- Business partnering with operations underwriting and business teams;
- Managing relationships with the brokers, underwriting and the business;
- Daily data validation, reconciliation and analysis;
- Monthly processing, controls & reporting;
- Monthly reconciliations / financial accounting;
- Continuous improvement of the credit control function;
General
- Develop meaningful and strong working relationships with brokers and key stakeholders across the Group.
- Adopt the Beazley culture of Professionalism, Integrity, Effectiveness and Dynamic attitude that contributes to an internal environment of teamwork and promotes a positive brand image to our external customers.
- Comply with Beazley procedures, policies and regulations relevant to your role. Undertake relevant training on Beazley policies and procedures as delivered by your line manager, the Talent Management development or assurance teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) either directly, via e-learning or the learning management system.
- Comply with any specific responsibilities necessary for your role as outlined by your line manager, the Talent Management development or assurance teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) and ensure you keep up to date with developments in these areas. This may include, amongst others, Beazley’s underwriting control standards, Beazley’s claims control standards, other Beazley standards and customer relationship management.
- Ensure that you uphold the Beazley principle of Treating Customers Fairly and Conduct.
- Carry out additional responsibilities as individually notified, either through your objectives or through the learning management system. These may include, among others, European Strategy Team, US Management team or membership of any Beazley committees.
- Discipline, within the Beazley Group guidelines, members of staff contravening regulations per staff handbook.
Key Responsibilities:
- Daily credit control technical processing;
- Debt collection activity in line with Beazley collection strategies (Dunning cycle).
- Allocation of daily and legacy unallocated cash against open debt items. Maintain a cumulative record of all unallocated cash items including which broker, status, comment on why unallocated and audit trial of actions.
- Supporting cash allocation by chasing brokers for missing payment details/remittances and chasing UCO & Underwriters for missing policy booking.
- Optimise auto cash allocation through root cause analysis of cash blockers, drive mitigating actions with brokers, operations, and digital IT.
- Assist with facilitating DD collections, rejections and reconciliation liaising with brokers as required.
- Identify open items to escalate into cancelation process.
- Calculation and preparation of refund, commission and legal fee payments
- Operate in line with credit control financial control framework.
- Business partnering with operations, underwriting and business teams
- Proactive debt management by UW division and broker.
- Work with the business to provide finance insight to collections and cash activity.
- Provide MI on aged debt, unallocated cash and collections patterns.
- Work with operational teams to align operational metrics to finance metrics.
- Assist with product implementations, migrations and system developments providing finance input to process and system requirements, and testing.
- Identify and raise data quality issues, customer facing pain points, broker behaviour trends.
- Collaborate with Broker relations to optimise broker experience and make Beazley easy to do business with.
- Managing relationships with the brokers, underwriters and the business;
- Liaison with Beazley underwriters, Claims and Finance staff as appropriate to resolve account queries.
- Managing internal / external payment queries and escalating as appropriate to ensure service levels are met.
- Provide professional service to brokers and other external partners in all interactions.
- Provide business divisions with a monthly aged debt summary for use in the renewals process.
- Daily data validation, reconciliation and analysis
- Review daily premium data including E2E Rec and liaise with IT and operations teams to resolve data quality issues and unusual transactions.
- Review policy feeds for inappropriate due dates and raise with operations team for immediate correction.
- Review and reconcile bank data to Agresso or cash allocation excel.
- Manage internal transfer/payments process including identifying and generating payment requests, monitoring actual payment activity and ensuring relevant journals are booked to GL.
- Analyse cash collection and allocation trends.
- Monthly processing, controls & reporting;
- Payment and management of Broker DD commission and ad hoc cash from customer commissions.
- Management, tracking and oversight of cancellation process.
- Support monthly reporting of cumulative unallocated cash by entity, broker and status by providing insight into cash blockers.
- Support monthly reporting of open debt - top 20 items (in each age bracket) and trends by providing insightful commentary on debt recoverability.
- Effectively communicate and report progress and escalate issues as required to senior management.
- Support six monthly debt recoverability reviews across entity and market.
- Monthly reconciliations / financial accounting;
- Monthly bank, debtor, UAC, transfer account reconciliations highlighting and recording transaction movements, for manager review. Working across credit control to ensure process is consistent.
- Continuous improvement of the credit control function.
- Ensure that appropriate standards are established and complied with.
- Ensure all processes and controls are fully documented and up to date.
- Use business knowledge and understanding of credit control processes to propose improvements and enhancements to process and systems, liaising with the business and IT as required.
- Support new functionality and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) as required
Personal Specification:
- Education and Qualifications
- General accounting knowledge.
- Educated to A level or equivalent.
- CICM/AAT/ACCA/CIMA qualified advantageous
- Skills and Abilities
- The ability to manage time, meet deadlines and prioritise.
- Advanced analytical analysis and data manipulation skills are essential.
- Ability to review, validate and reconcile data between multiple systems is essential.
- Strong accounting and finance control skills are essential.
- Strong presentation skills are essential.
- Strong underwriting and finance system interrogation skills, ability to identify data quality, validation, and transfer issues are essential.
- Accurate and numerate, attention to detail.
- Excellent communicator, able to communicate effectively both verbally and in writing with internal and external stakeholders and influence outcomes.
- Self motivated, able to work on own initiative and use problem solving skills to proactively resolve issues.
- Ability to work independently.
- Strong computer skills.
- Being fluent in French would be desirable, however not essential
- Knowledge and Experience
- Experience credit control collections and cash allocations essential.
- Experience of process / system improvement in a Finance team is essential.
- Experience of working in a Lloyds/general insurance environment is desirable.
- Experience and knowledge of Xchanging processes advantageous, in particular knowledge of premiums and claims processing requirements.
- Familiar with accounting principles.
- Advanced knowledge of Excel.
- Experience of FIS GetPaid, GoCardless, Agresso, MyBeazley or similar underwriting systems / credit control systems / broker portals is desirable.
- Aptitude and Disposition
- Outcome focused; self motivated and enthusiastic.
- Professional approach to successfully interact with internal service company staff (underwriters, underwriting assistants, business managers and finance) as well as external contacts, in particular Brokers.
- Ability and willingness to roll up sleeves and get involved in detail.
- Ability to interact with individuals at all levels of the company.
- Competencies
- Concern for quality, Relationship builder, teamwork, good communicator, attention to detail, Initiative, business awareness, advocate for change, problem solver.
