Across the global insurance industry, the most important business logic still lives in Excel.
From capital models and product raters to fully customized illustrations, Excel remains the fastest way for actuarial teams to build, iterate, and validate complex logic.
But as product demands grow — and speed-to-market becomes a competitive advantage — many insurers are running into the same problem: how to scale what works in Excel into systems that are governed, fast, and connected.
That’s exactly what Coherent Spark was designed for.
Coherent Spark instantly transforms Excel models into governed APIs, ready to plug into your core systems. No recoding required.
Business users stay in control of their models. IT gains the transparency and integration needed to scale securely. And teams can move from spreadsheet to production in a fraction of the time.
Here’s how three insurers across different markets and product lines used that approach to solve high-stakes problems — and delivered outsized results:
- A faster path to regulatory compliance for a stochastic asset-liability model
- A multi-million-dollar savings on product rater modernization
- The industry’s first fully-customizable life product with real-time pricing
Three use cases. Three very different goals. One solution that scaled to meet them all.
1. Converting a Stochastic Capital Model for Faster Regulatory Compliance
The Problem
A global life insurer needed to convert a complex stochastic asset-liability model — used to run cost of guarantee calculations across 1,000 economic scenarios generated by embedded sub-models — to meet new international capital regulations.
But the model took 8.5 hours to run and relied heavily on VBA, making documentation, testing, and governance difficult. Coding the model into the company’s legacy actuarial system would take months — time the team didn’t have.
The Coherent Spark Approach
Instead of re-coding, the actuarial team used Coherent Spark to tag inputs and outputs and upload the Excel model directly. Within minutes, the actuarial team had a fully functional, cloud-based API version. No developers required. And full visibility for IT to apply governance and controls.
The Results
The converted model had:
- 99.6% reduction in runtime (from 8.5 hours to 2 minutes)
- No reliance on VBA, improving transparency and control
- Externalized assumptions with automated data feeds
- Built-in governance and template-based reviews
Why It Worked
Coherent Spark enabled rapid digitization without sacrificing control. The team moved to a scalable, cloud-based environment while retaining their Excel logic — meeting regulatory deadlines and improving model transparency across teams.
2. Modernizing Product Raters and Saving $3M in Development Costs
The Problem
A leading group benefits provider needed to modernize multiple product raters maintained in Excel. These raters were critical for agent quoting but difficult to scale. The estimated time and cost to re-code them was 18 months and $3M — delaying growth plans and risking competitiveness in a crowded market.
The Coherent Spark Approach
By uploading their existing raters to Coherent Spark, the team automatically converted spreadsheet logic into governed APIs. This eliminated the need for manual re-coding and enabled seamless integration with digital platforms.
The Results
- $3M+ in project costs reallocated to other priorities
- 18-month timeline compressed to just 2 months
- 89% improvement in speed-to-market
- Empowered actuarial teams to maintain raters directly in Excel
- Faster launches for new products in a market with 60+ competitors
Why It Worked
Coherent Spark allowed the business to modernize quickly — without waiting for full-code rebuilds or IT backlogs. The actuarial team stayed in Excel, while the downstream systems gained clean, governed APIs they could easily work with.
3. Launching India’s First Fully-Customizable Life Product with Real-Time Pricing
The Problem
A leading life insurer in India wanted to offer a fully-customizable policy where customers could design their own coverage — selecting premium terms, payment schedules, and benefits based on individual needs.
The catch? Supporting that level of customization would require millions of premium rate tables, which couldn’t be managed in legacy systems. And rigid operational processes — built for static products — made frequent updates nearly impossible.
The company needed a new approach to pricing: one that could calculate premiums dynamically, without pre-generated tables, and work within existing systems.
The Coherent Spark Approach
The insurer uploaded two Excel-based models to Coherent Spark:
- A Benefit Illustration model, which receives customer inputs from front-end systems.
- A Pricing model, which calculates premiums in real-time based on customer selections.
Coherent Spark converted both models into APIs and enabled real-time data exchange between them and the insurer’s front-end platforms and legacy backend. No re-coding. No custom infrastructure.
The Results
- First-to-market with a fully-customizable, non-participating life product
- Record-breaking new business premium, reaching targets faster than any prior launch
- Scalable model, now powering a second customizable product in the participating category
Why It Worked
Instead of forcing a legacy system to handle endless static tables, Coherent Spark enabled real-time pricing using dynamic logic — all maintained in Excel. The actuarial team retained full ownership of the model, while IT avoided a costly system overhaul.
This allowed the insurer to shift from a rigid, product-centric model to a customer-driven offering — delivering personalized experiences at scale without compromising control or maintainability.
You Don’t Need to Replace Excel — Just Rethink How You Scale It
These three stories show what’s possible when insurers stop trying to rebuild what already works and start scaling it more intelligently.
Coherent Spark transforms the logic your teams already use in Excel into governed, production-ready APIs that plug into your existing systems.
No re-coding. No architectural overhauls. Just faster execution, better control, and real business results.
This isn’t a one-off fix.
It’s a repeatable model for scaling product logic across the enterprise.
If your teams are still building in spreadsheets, you’re not behind. You’re ready.
