August 21, 2025

Yandy Plasencia: Data Reconciliation for the CFO

56 minutes

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Yandy Plasencia, founder and CEO of DataHaven Software.

In today’s conversation, we talk about Yandy’s journey and vision as well as how mid-sized insurance companies can explore and empower their finance teams, especially their CFOs, by automating data reconciliation and unlocking real-time insights.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

For the most part, it all comes down to the basic ledger/sub-ledger challenge. The core systems are transactional and contain all the information about what took place, which payments were paid out, when a claim came in, and everything needed to verify that a claim has coverage within the rules defined by the policy. If the data isn’t easy to extract and digestible for the right audience, it will be challenging for that audience to interpret, reconcile, and do so in a timely fashion.

In smaller carriers, there will be more technical folks who are not necessarily business-oriented. There’s always a gap between what the business and technology folks are looking for, and although technology does a very good job of getting the data where it needs to go, it doesn’t always meet the needs of the finance and accounting folks. There an ongoing friction between both departments.

You need to build an intelligence layer with well-defined relationships across every data point related to financials. If it affects financials, you need to have a relationship, ontology, or something that tells you how these data points are interrelated. If you don’t have that, then it’s only creating a problem for something else that’s going to come up very soon.

The main issue with spreadsheets with visualisation tools is that those tools solve the problem short-term until they don’t, they are extremely helpful until they become painful, and they become a bottleneck for the organisation to grow eventually. The tools don’t have change processes in place as data sets grow and organisations expand. They also become a personnel risk because only 1 or 2 people in the company understand it.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Data is a powerful tool, and it’s “make it or break it” for a lot of companies, especially in insurance, where the devil is in the details.’

‘Being able to trace an expense back to the root system and getting a full transactional detail for that specific number is the most reliable way to do something.’

‘It’s only labour-intensive if you try to do this completely manually and you don’t leverage artificial intelligence in the right ways, and if you don’t have a defined framework to do this, if you do, it’s much easier.’

‘It’s not rocket science… It’s just data science.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Yandy Plasencia is a visionary entrepreneur and software architect with deep expertise in AI, data engineering, insurance technology, and regulatory compliance.

At DataHaven, Yandy and his team are creating an insurance-specific intelligence layer that automates reconciliation, accelerates financial analysis, and helps leadership trace changes in loss or expense ratios directly to operational events.

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine VanderLinden is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur and the CEO of Alchemy Crew Ventures. She leads venture-client labs that help Fortune 500 companies adopt and scale cutting-edge technologies from global tech ventures. A builder of accelerators, investor, and co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, Sabine is known for asking the uncomfortable questions—about AI governance, risk, and trust. On Scouting for Growth, she decodes how real growth happens—where capital, collaboration, and courage meet.

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By Sabine VanderLinden

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