Pain Points of the Modern Actuary—And How to Solve For Them

Actuaries play a critical role in helping financial services and insurance companies manage risk and make informed decisions. Their role includes creating and managing complex business models, analyzing data and risk probabilities, and providing insights that guide financial planning and strategic decision-making. As these industries and the market environment have become increasingly more complex, so has their role and the challenges they face.

Increasing Regulatory Demands

Actuaries typically work in heavily regulated industries. Ensuring that business models are compliant with ever-changing regulations is essential, but difficult. Actuaries need to interpret and implement new regulations in a consistent way across the organization, but many actuarial models live in spreadsheet silos making transparency and integration challenging. Spreadsheet version control also becomes an issue as models change to meet regulatory requirements. How can actuaries ensure that a regulation change is made in every version of the model when they lack visibility into everywhere the model is being used?

Managing More Complex Data Sets 

While access to vast amounts of data enables more accurate risk assessments and predictive modeling, it also creates challenges for data quality and analysis. As actuaries typically rely on Excel, they must determine how to manage complex data sets when version control, auditability, and governance are inherent weaknesses of spreadsheets. Actuaries need solutions that enable them to manage data efficiently and accurately so they can continue to provide data-driven insights with significantly larger, more complex data sets.

Balancing Speed and Accuracy

Actuaries often work under tight deadlines, requiring them to balance the need for speed with maintaining accuracy and precision. This can be problematic when an Excel-based model takes hours to run simulations and provide results. Actuaries must maintain up-to-date, accurate models understanding that any changes can require re-running large models to create the necessary output and analysis.

Finding the Right Programming Skills  

Almost every actuary uses Excel on a daily basis. It is the “go-to” choice when solving complicated problems. Excel is readily available, easy to use, and capable of creating remarkably complex actuarial models. Actuaries have grown dependent on Excel to do heavy lifting beyond what it was designed to do. And now many companies are pressuring actuaries to learn additional programming languages that can be used in enterprise cloud-based computing environments.

But, according to the Casualty Actuarial Society’s First Annual Technology Survey, only a minority of actuaries are interested in becoming more proficient in programming languages like Python or SQL.  Over 80% saw time as the biggest barrier to learning new technologies, so how can actuaries overcome the known limitations of Excel without abandoning Excel?

Solving the Modern Actuary’s Pain Points

The underlying theme in the challenges facing the modern actuary is the dependence on Excel despite its known constraints. But pushing actuaries to replace Excel with enterprise computing has proven to be an ineffective solution, as well. 

The industry needs an actuarial transformation that enables actuaries to independently create, manage, and run scalable, automated, cloud-based models without specialized programming skills. In other words, enabling actuaries to maintain the flexibility of Excel while simultaneously eliminating the inherent drawbacks of Excel.

Coherent Spark does exactly that by turning complex spreadsheets into automated workflows in seconds. Actuaries can build and test Excel-based models directly in the Spark platform or connect the workflows to enterprise-wide processes. Actuarial models created in Excel now have scale, control, and governance without relying on legacy systems or specialist programming skills.

The Spark Solution

Coherent Spark can provide the speed, control, transparency, and automation that actuaries need to harness the flexibility of Excel AND the power of enterprise-grade, cloud computing. 

To learn more, download our whitepaper, Actuary 3.0 – The Actuary, the Spreadsheet, and the Future or explore our free sandbox and convert your first spreadsheet today.  

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