If you work in insurance, chances are you’ve got mission-critical rating models sitting in Excel files. These models do the heavy lifting – calculating premiums, managing risk factors, and ensuring accurate pricing. But how much value can they deliver when disconnected from your broader tech stack? They’re static, reliant on manual updates, and nearly impossible to govern at scale.
By treating Excel models as API-driven assets instead, insurance teams gain:
- Faster deployment. Skip IT bottlenecks and launch new products in minutes.
- Improved efficiency. Maintain a transparent audit trail of every change.
- Seamless integrations. Connect models to your policy admin system, underwriting workbench, broker portal – wherever they’re needed.
Enter Coherent Spark. Our platform transforms your Excel-based rating models and instantly converts them into scalable APIs for you.
Let’s walk through how it works.
Convert an Excel Model into an API
The process starts with a typical Excel workbook. Take, for example, a Cyber Insurance Rater used for pricing policies. This file contains all the business logic, calculations, and formulas needed to generate premiums. But in its current form, it exists in isolation, requiring manual input and suffering from governance gaps.
Using Excel’s Name Manager, users define input and output cells by tagging them with simple naming conventions (e.g., Xinput_State, Xoutput_PremiumTable). This step ensures that every relevant variable in the model is explicitly labeled for API conversion.
Once uploaded to Coherent Spark, the platform extracts the logic from the Excel workbook, translates it into production-ready code, and exposes it as a fully functional API – ready to be integrated with your core systems.
Watch how this transformation happens in real-time:
Govern Your API Like Source Code
Creating an API is just the first step – governance is where the real power lies.
How do you ensure proper versioning, debugging, and compliance tracking of your Excel raters? Coherent Spark helps you treat Excel models as source code, meaning every change is tracked, version-controlled, and auditable. If you need to update a rate table – say, increasing the base rate for a specific state – you simply modify the original Excel file and re-upload it to Coherent Spark. Our platform will generate a new minor version of the API, without overriding the previous version.
Want to compare changes between versions? Coherent Spark provides a visual report that highlights every formal modification and downstream effects, ensuring transparency across updates.
See how versioning and governance work in action:
Run Large-Scale Testing & Compliance Checks
Before deploying an updated model, it makes sense to test its behavior under real-world conditions. Coherent Spark’s Test Bed feature allows users to generate thousands of test cases automatically, leveraging Excel’s built-in data validations rules.
This allows teams to:
- Detect anomalies early by stress-testing the model across different input permutations
- Validate premium calculations before pushing changes to production
- Ensure regulatory compliance by keeping detailed logs of API calls and historical inputs
Beyond Specialty Rating Models: What’s Next?
Coherent solves the classic Excel problems of connectivity and governance. This means you don't have to apologize for using Excel as an integral piece of your insurance operations. Quite the opposite, in fact. You can go far beyond raters: think rules engines, commission or tax calculations, reserving... the list goes on.
Add in some of Coherent's advanced features – like having one model call another, or bringing in real-time data from external APIs – and suddenly your most knowledgeable experts are able to deploy extraordinary assets to production, all responsibly governed in your broader tech stack.
