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Business Challenges and Aspirations

Based on our initial discussions about the actuarial process challenges at Aspen, we understand the following to be the detailed list of challenges faced by, and aspirations that Aspen has for its actuarial infrastructure.

Challenges

  • The actuarial reserving calculations are done manually in excel by each actuary individually
  • Lack of  standard reserving templates makes the subsequent reserving output data collection process cumbersome
  • Pricing and reserving actuaries are not able to readily collaborate due to lack of a platform
  • The underwriting raters are written in excel and not standardized
  • There is an IT process to take rater outputs from excel and save them to a SQL server database for aggregation and analysis  but it is time consuming and difficult to join the data together with the  actuarial data outputs
  • The lack of a workbench application makes it difficult to coordinate the actuaries, underwriters and finance
  • Lack of an automated feed into the ledger necessitates a manual workaround
  • Lack of transparency and manual workarounds creates downstream issues between finance and actuaries, eg; benchmarking
  • Without a proper data infrastructure, its difficult to integrate new pricing applications or technologies such as Aon’s Tyche
  • DIfficulty in accessing data for reporting or for use in other applications within the firm
  • Concern with existing third party actuarial applications being black box tools; not transparent  

Aspirations  

  • Explore the use of cloud solutions for creating  data repositories, from client source systems and excel/ text files
  • Continue to use Microsoft Excel as an interface for applications and processes; the transparency and auditability of Microsoft Excel is very useful and dissipates the need to build workarounds
  • Build a workbench to coordinate workflows of the pricing, underwriting, finance and reserving departments
  • Allow actuaries and underwriters to continue building ad hoc solutions in Excel, R or python using SSOT data
  • Build automated feed to ledger for actuarial
  • Have the freedom to start exploring new applications for pricing and modeling without concerns for data integration  

Proposed solution – Optimo

Optimo© is a Software As A Solution (‘SAAS’) offering; built completely on the cloud, which includes not only data management but also business applications and reporting tools. The platform allows the client to bring in data from a myriad of sources such as the following;

  1. Relational data sources such as SQL server, Oracle server
  2. Flat files extracts such as CSV or text files
  3. Excel files with different formats and structure
  4. Documents in json formats, jpg, pdf both readable and image
  5. IOT data and www data with different formats

The client has the ability to build out cadence on how often to bring in transactions from these sources. From bringing in transactions on an annual or quarterly basis, to live feeds of data from policy source systems or IOT data such as twitter feeds or search engine logs, Optimo© gives the client the flexibility to configure it to its needs. Data cleansing logic can be set up at the same time to prep the data upon ingestion. After the ingestion of data, the data is staged, from where the client can set up paths on how to join the various datasets together and curate the data to create the Single Source Of Truth (‘SSOT’) layer, called Matrix. This layer becomes the fountain of data that then feeds all subsequent application and reporting needs.

The client is able to extract data in API form for live transactions from the Matrix or as flat file outputs for data manipulation or one time uploads to client reporting or application databases. The client is also able to take advantage of a myriad of business applications within the Optimo platform such as the reserving or reinsurance tools. These applications have the user interfaces setup in spreadsheet form similar to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. There is complete flexibility in configuring the application to the client’s unique needs such as building customs methodologies for the calculation of liabilities. The client can also configure workflow moderators to coordinate different teams within the platform and check on the status of the disparate efforts at play.

Finally, the client can use business intelligence tools within the platform or extract data out of the platform for use in their On-Prem BI solution. Optimo covers the whole vertical from data sourcing to transformation to computations and finally, to reporting and data extractions.