On this episode of Scouting For Growth, Sabine VdL sits down with Yandy Plasencia, Founder and CEO of DataHaven Software, to tackle a challenge that quietly keeps CFOs awake at night: How do you run a modern insurance business when your financial truth is trapped across systems, spreadsheets, and “only Susan knows how this works” dashboards? This episode is a must-listen for mid-sized carriers, finance leaders, and transformation teams who want faster close cycles, cleaner reporting, and real-time visibility—without ripping out core systems. The problem: the ledger vs sub-ledger reality Yandy breaks down the root issue with sharp clarity: most insurance core systems are transactional. They capture everything—claims, payments, coverage decisions, timing, policy rules. But just because the data exists doesn’t mean it’s usable. If it can’t be extracted and made digestible for the right audience (especially finance), reconciliation becomes slow, painful, and error-prone. That’s where the classic insurance tension emerges: technology teams can move data around… but it often doesn’t arrive in a form that finance teams can actually trust and act on. The hidden friction in mid-sized carriers In smaller and mid-sized insurers, Yandy observes a common pattern: highly technical teams running infrastructure, and business teams trying to manage results. That gap creates constant friction—especially between IT and finance. And the CFO is stuck in the middle, expected to deliver fast insight with slow tools. The fix: an insurance-specific intelligence layer Yandy’s solution is not “another spreadsheet.” It’s building an intelligence layer that defines clear relationships across every data point that touches financials. He emphasizes the importance of an ontology—meaning the system understands how pieces connect: If it affects financials, it must have a relationship model behind it. Without that framework, you’re not solving the problem. You’re just postponing the next crisis. Why spreadsheets and dashboards stop scaling Yandy doesn’t attack spreadsheets because they’re useless. He attacks them because they’re dangerous at scale. Visualisation tools often solve the problem—until they don’t. As datasets grow and organizations expand, they become: bottlenecks change-management nightmares and a huge personnel risk (when only 1–2 people understand the logic) That’s not “agile.” That’s operational debt with a prettier interface. The CFO advantage: traceability and real-time clarity One of the strongest takeaways from the episode is the power of traceability: being able to trace an expense back to the source system and see full transactional detail is the most reliable way to reconcile and act. This is where automation and AI become a strategic edge. Yandy makes the point: reconciliation is only labour-intensive if you do it manually—or without a defined framework. With the right structure, AI can automate the grunt work and unlock real-time insight. And his closing line is as bold as it is true: It’s not rocket science. It’s just data science. Why this episode matters now For insurance executives, this conversation is a roadmap for building finance agility without destabilizing operations. Because in insurance, “the devil is in the details”—and the companies that win won’t be the ones with the loudest dashboards. They’ll be the ones with the cleanest financial truth, fastest reconciliation, and the ability to explain performance in real time—before the board asks twice.