Discovery’s decision to partner with OneStream for its major hardware infrastructure project came after a careful assessment of its outdated financial consolidation tool.
Discovery, originally known for its medical aid services, has significantly expanded its offerings, necessitating a unified platform for its financial reporting and performance management.
Today, Discovery’s portfolio includes a range of services that complement each other, such as Vitality for promoting healthier lifestyles, car insurance, banking, life insurance, and its core medical aid and gap cover products.
To effectively manage the financial aspects of these diverse services, Discovery adopted OneStream. The OneStream platform supports complex financial consolidation, budgeting, forecasting, financial reporting and data quality management, providing comprehensive lifecycle support, taking finance further as a strategic partner to the Discovery business, according to Lorraine Venter, Onestream sales director for the Middle East and Africa.
Financial software vendor OneStream is a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company was formed around 2010, signed up its first customer in 2012 and has seen its growth take off materially in recent years.
When releasing the company’s second quarter results to June 2024, CEO Tom Shea said, “Our strong top line growth in the second quarter underscores our continued momentum in the first half of the year, including achieving positive cash flow from operations and free cash flow for the third quarter in a row.”
He added that: “Our growth trajectory reflects what’s happening in the world of finance today. CFOs are being asked to strategically guide the business towards growth against an economically volatile backdrop. We are in a solid position to empower the office of the CFO with the operating system for modern finance and we remain committed to helping finance leaders around the world effectively steer their businesses.”
Kasturi Bandiah, head of reporting optimisation at Discovery and owner of the OneStream implementation, highlighted the need to replace their outdated consolidation tool, which relied on multiple systems and spreadsheets for various types of reporting. “We wanted a single platform for all our reporting needs,” she explained.
A clear vision
Discovery had a clear vision of the functionalities required from the new solution, aiming for a platform that could support all types of reporting and scale with the company’s growth. Kasturi emphasised that Discovery, being a dynamic and innovative company, needed a flexible yet stable system.
“After a rigorous evaluation process, we chose OneStream,” Kasturi explained.
In the year to June, Discovery reported increases in normalised operating profit, which gained 17 percent, while core new business annual premium income grew 18 percent. At the results presentation in September 2024, CEO Adrian Gore said “over the past eight years, we have been through a cycle of significant investment, with a focus on globalising the group’s capabilities, footprint, and scale, as well as building new ventures such as Discovery Bank. This investment cycle was aimed at creating new avenues for long-term growth and we are confident that the business is positioned well to capitalise on this investment.”
Since the project’s inception last March, OneStream has enabled Discovery to develop a solution tailored to their current needs while also allowing for future growth and expansion in line with their business strategy.
Lorraine explained that the first priority was to understand the broader organisation’s needs. For instance, it was crucial to determine how Discovery’s various outgoing business lines could be consolidated to facilitate strategic planning as part of Discovery’s future vision, and not only focus on their short-term requirements.
OneStream also had to integrate these diverse businesses onto a single platform to meet the group’s governance and structural requirements.
Kasturi noted that the implementation was particularly complex, marking the largest hardware infrastructure project that Discovery finance had faced in decades.
To avoid disruptions, Discovery formed a dedicated team for the OneStream implementation. This involved ensuring that team members were adequately skilled to manage their tasks effectively.
One logical data model
Lorraine emphasised the importance of team commitment to timelines and deliverables, as well as the necessity of thorough training before the project began.
This included ensuring everyone was familiar with the technological terminology, as “words matter”.
Discovery’s approach, which Lorraine describes as unique among OneStream’s clients, involved developing a comprehensive training manual for all end users based on Discovery’s application. This manual ensured that all users understood the project’s timing and benefits, a practice OneStream plans to recommend to future clients.
Kasturi is particularly proud of the training aspect. “We developed a very detailed training programme. We enhanced, modified, and created new content to ensure our users could fully understand OneStream and how it could support them. We also further only granted user access as each user completed their training. Training levels were linked to our Discovery Vitality levels: blue, bronze, silver, gold, diamond status,” she said.
Discovery has already experienced significant time savings, reducing what Lorraine referred to as the “technical debt” associated with maintaining multiple products, environments, and hardware systems, as well as transferring data between them. “With OneStream, data resides in one logical data model in one application,” she explained.
Kasturi added that the teams now using OneStream “couldn’t imagine how much better life would be with OneStream, because all they knew was their previous system. The ability to refresh numbers so quickly has been incredible.”
