USAA Extends Workiva Use Cases Across Multiple Businesses

Liani Castillo is Lead Business Operations Analyst at the United Services Automobile Association (USAA), a Fortune 500 diversified financial services organization that serves active U.S. military members and veterans. Liani works within the office of the CFO, and with financial data from USAA’s 57 workspaces funneling into it, she’s always seeking ways to curb risk and enable better data-use practices. In a project management position, she coordinates with cross-functional financial teams that use Workiva. Liani’s key role in extending Workiva use cases has facilitated improved data governance standards across USAA’s extensive operations. 

Connecting the dots with automation

Former manual working processes couldn’t keep pace and lacked proper controls for the level of data Liani oversees—emails with attachments, especially, exposed risks. When Liani joined the organization, USAA was already using the Workiva platform within certain workspaces, but Workiva’s portfolio of solutions provided Liani further functionality and scalability she needed to securely wrangle a copious amount of data from USAA’s multiple organizations.

As Liani identified new use case opportunities, persuading teams was easy. “They were already on board, so I really didn’t have to convince anybody. Other teams who weren’t using Workiva would come to me and say, ‘I heard this team can help eliminate manual processes that we have to do, but don't want to do anymore. Can we use Workiva for that?’” Liani said.

More than 500 users across the enterprise use Workiva’s annual and interim reporting, SEC reporting, investment reporting, management reporting, and controls management reporting solutions, among others, for USAA’s external reporting, capital markets, treasury services, and SOX compliance operations. 

Across each of these functions, manual data retrieval is greatly reduced, if not eliminated all together. “We don't have to worry about data not being validated anymore. We bring the data in as automatically as possible, and then we have key stakeholders check the numbers,” Liani said. And with the Workiva certifications feature used to get sign-offs, she can rest assured that the “final” numbers are really final. 

She added, “I think if we didn't have Workiva to help us, everybody would have a lot more work.”