Church Mutual Insurance Company has created a new senior finance role, appointing Ben Parisi as vice president and head of finance operations and financial planning and analysis (FP&A). The move puts finance operations, expense management, procurement, payroll and management reporting under a single executive as insurers increasingly use automation, cloud platforms and AI to modernize back-office functions.

Church Mutual Insurance Company is adding another layer of finance leadership as the insurer works to evolve how its finance organization operates.

The company has appointed Ben Parisi as vice president, head of finance operations and financial planning and analysis. The newly created position combines responsibility for finance operations, expense management, procurement, payroll, FP&A and management reporting. Parisi will report to Daniel Kim, Church Mutual’s senior vice president and chief financial officer.

Church Mutual announced the appointment September 8. The insurer said the position is intended to strengthen the financial insight and operational support available to the broader business. Those are fairly conventional goals for a modern finance organization, but the consolidation of operational finance and FP&A responsibilities is notable as insurers rethink the systems and processes supporting the CFO function.

Parisi arrives with more than 25 years of finance experience, including more than 20 years at Zurich North America. Most recently, he was vice president and head of finance operations there, overseeing premium and fee collections, disbursements, cash management and other finance functions.

His previous Zurich responsibilities also included expense management and FP&A. According to Church Mutual, Parisi worked on planning, forecasting, financial modeling and process improvement, while partnering with business leaders on financial performance and decision-making. Earlier positions included work at Aon Risk Services and Coleman, Epstein, Berlin & Co. LLP.

That background is relevant to a broader shift taking place across financial services: finance teams are increasingly expected to operate as data and decision-support organizations rather than simply as accounting and reporting functions.

Gartner’s 2025 research found that 59% of finance organizations were using AI, up only slightly from 58% in 2024. The research also identified knowledge management, accounts-payable automation and error detection as among the leading finance AI use cases.

The numbers point to an important distinction. AI adoption in finance is no longer experimental, but neither is it uniformly mature. Finance leaders still have to connect automation projects with clean data, governance, existing enterprise systems and measurable business outcomes.

That makes the organizational structure around finance technology important. A senior executive responsible for both finance operations and FP&A can potentially connect transactional data with planning, forecasting and management reporting. The appointment itself does not establish that Church Mutual is deploying a specific AI or cloud-finance platform, however. The company has not announced a particular technology initiative alongside Parisi’s appointment.

The timing fits a wider insurance technology transition. McKinsey has argued that insurers are under pressure to modernize legacy systems, automate operations and integrate technology more closely with business processes. Its research has also highlighted how technology-driven operating models can change cost structures and improve productivity across insurance organizations.

For the wider financial technology and digital payments market, the implications are indirect but meaningful. Modern insurance finance increasingly intersects with digital payments platforms through premium collection, claims disbursement, reconciliation, treasury operations and customer-facing payment experiences. Those workflows depend on reliable financial data and integration between core insurance systems, banking infrastructure and payment networks.

The same architecture is relevant to open banking infrastructure and embedded finance platforms. As financial services become more connected to software and digital ecosystems, insurers need finance systems capable of moving information between internal applications and external financial-service providers. Embedded finance infrastructure can make payments and financial products part of broader digital experiences, while better finance data can help organizations manage those transactions and their financial consequences.

Blockchain financial technology and digital assets are less directly connected to this appointment, but they belong to the same modernization conversation. Insurers and financial institutions evaluating tokenized assets, distributed-ledger settlement or new payment rails still require conventional controls around accounting, reporting, reconciliation and risk management.

For fintech startups, the opportunity is therefore not limited to customer-facing applications. Back-office finance remains a large technology market. Startups building FP&A software, intelligent reconciliation, accounts-payable automation, financial data infrastructure and AI-assisted reporting are competing alongside established enterprise vendors.

That competitive environment includes companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, whose enterprise software ecosystems increasingly connect analytics, automation and financial workflows. Cloud infrastructure from Amazon and Microsoft, meanwhile, provides much of the underlying technology layer on which financial applications can be built. Adobe is relevant further up the customer-experience stack, particularly where digital document and workflow experiences intersect with financial services.

Gartner reported in 2025 that generative AI, machine learning and cloud ERP ranked among the technologies finance leaders expected to prioritize for future investment. In a separate survey, 77% of CFOs said they planned to increase technology spending in 2025, with 47% planning increases of at least 10%.

Church Mutual’s appointment should therefore be read less as a technology product announcement and more as an organizational signal. Finance leadership is increasingly being positioned around data quality, planning, automation and operational efficiency.

Parisi holds an MBA from DePaul University, is a CPA and earned a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness, farm and financial management with an accounting concentration from the University of Illinois. He will be based at Church Mutual’s Madison, Wisconsin, office.

For insurers, the harder question will be what comes after organizational restructuring: whether finance teams can turn better-integrated data and technology into faster planning cycles, more accurate forecasting, stronger controls and lower administrative costs.

Market Landscape

The appointment arrives amid a broader modernization of insurance technology, financial technology and banking technology. Finance organizations are investing in cloud ERP, AI-enabled analytics, intelligent process automation and reporting systems, while insurers face pressure to reduce manual work across finance and operations.

Gartner says 84% of finance organizations have either implemented or are planning to implement AI, although only 7% report high or very high impact so far. That gap highlights the industry’s central challenge: moving from technology adoption to measurable operational value.

For digital payments platforms and embedded finance providers, insurer modernization creates adjacent opportunities in collections, payouts, reconciliation, fraud controls and financial-data integration. For fintech startups, it reinforces demand for infrastructure that can connect legacy financial systems with modern APIs, analytics and automation.

Top Insights

• Church Mutual created a finance leadership role spanning operations and FP&A as insurers rethink finance around data, automation and decision support.
• Ben Parisi brings more than 25 years of finance experience, including over two decades at Zurich North America.
• Gartner reports that 59% of finance organizations used AI in 2025, showing adoption is substantial but still far from universal.
• The appointment does not announce a specific AI, payments or cloud platform, making its technology significance primarily organizational.
• Modern insurer finance increasingly intersects with digital payments, reconciliation, embedded finance infrastructure and enterprise data platforms.

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