A mutual insurance group faced cost control objectives within a restrictive regulatory environment (Solvency II).

The management of operating expenses (OPEX), capital expenditures (CAPEX), and payroll was fragmented across separate processes and tools, preventing a consolidated view and consistent expenditure governance. The executive committee lacked the visibility needed to prioritize investment and recruitment.

Before implementing any tools, a clarification of the target budget structure and harmonization of methodologies were essential.

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The central challenge was overall control of spending: how to provide the Executive Committee with a consolidated and coherent view of all spending commitments (OPEX, CAPEX, payroll), when these components were managed in separate silos with different methodologies?

The fragmentation of budget management prevented any comprehensive overview: trade-offs between recruitment and investment, between OPEX and CAPEX, were made without a coherent decision-making framework. The overall spending trajectory was only visible after the fact.

The objective was to build a system that would:

• consolidate OPEX, CAPEX, and payroll within a unified budgetary framework,

• ensure consistency between the different budget components,

• provide the Executive Committee with complete visibility to prioritize spending.

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The Executive Committee (COMEX) had expressed its frustration at never having a consolidated view of spending commitments when making budget decisions. We worked to break down the silos between the Finance Department, Human Resources, and operational departments, each of which had developed its own tools and timelines.

The work focused on:

• harmonizing budget calendars so that OPEX, CAPEX, and staffing allocations could be made consistently rather than sequentially;

• defining a decision-making framework enabling the COMEX to visualize trade-offs (recruiting vs. investing, internalizing vs. outsourcing) with their consolidated impacts; and

• implementing consistency checks to detect inconsistencies between the different budget components (e.g., a CAPEX project without the associated staffing levels). The COMEX now has a complete view of the commitment trajectory to inform its decisions.

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