General description of system
SunGard's iWorks Prophet Professional is an integrated suite of actuarial systems used primarily by insurance companies to perform actuarial calculations including profit testing, projections, reserving, asset liability modelling, stochastic modelling and risk management. It helps insurance and other financial services companies to meet their reporting responsibilities and improve risk management.
Prophet Enterprise was introduced in 2007 to complement Prophet Professional. Prophet Enterprise is a server-based production-run environment for Prophet Professional models. It provides the ability to separate development and production functions giving an industrial, robust and scalable environment suitable for insurers' significant reporting runs.
Prophet features actuarial libraries engineered separately from the modelling system to deliver solutions which can be customised and deployed around the world. This enables the end-user to quickly build and set up complex actuarial and risk management models, and perform runs.
Accurate asset/liability projections are crucial to the success of any insurance or financial services company - but they are not the only requirement for actuarial software. To keep pace with the dynamic insurance industry, such a system must also handle multiple insurance-related calculations, and integrate with other vital business software. Additionally, it must be able to make these projections in every country where you do business. This is where Prophet can help.
Functions performed
Prophet Professional and the associated standard libraries perform the major actuarial calculations that are essential for the successful risk management of a financial services organisation, including:
- Economic capital
- Embedded values
- Asset/liability modelling and cash-flow testing
- Stochastic projections for risk-based capital, European embedded values and Solvency II
- Product pricing and design
- Financial reporting
- Appraisal valuations
- Budgeting and planning
- Statutory valuations
- Gross premium valuations and recoverability analysis
In addition, SunGard offers further solutions specifically targeted at modelling enterprise market, credit and operational risks, namely Adaptiv and Bancware.
Specific Solvency II features
Prophet can assist with both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of Solvency II.
The Prophet ALM libraries are already used around the world for similar solvency and risk-based capital calculations, for example, ICAs in the UK. It will be possible to perform Solvency II standard formula or internal model assessment using the Prophet ALS (Asset Liability Strategy) Library.
Having auditable models has always been important but in tomorrow's regulatory environment it will be essential. Prophet is unparalleled in providing the ability for models to be based largely on common libraries and a simple but flexible coding environment where changes are needed. This all adds up to very auditable process and environment. Further enhancements to make Prophet even more auditable are under way to help our customers to meet their regulatory obligations.
In addition SunGard has solutions which enable an insurer to fulfil a use test of an actuarial model. The Prophet Replicating Portfolio Module allows integration and communication with other parts of the business like never before. SunGard solutions for enterprise-wide daily (or even intra-daily) market risk, credit risk and operational risk assessments allow informed and intelligent risk management and hedging.
SunGard is able to provide far wider solutions to the Solvency II puzzle than an actuarial modelling platform.
Important qualititative areas include:
- Data integrity framework including reconciliations using SunGard's Intellimatch
- Straight through processing to reporting
- Business process management
- Database \ Data warehouse integration
- Integration with other systems
- Experience analysis using SunGard's iWorks Glean
Specifications
Prophet Professional is a Windows desktop software application which can be installed on PC in minutes. Prophet features extremely fast run-times. In addition Prophet offers integrated parallel computing options where calculations are split and other PCs or blade machines are used as workers to further increase performance.
Prophet Enterprise is a client/server and SOA application for the Windows environment. Prophet Enterprise was built from the ground up with grid computing in mind. It offers its own integrated grid computing system as well as integration possibilities with other third-party grid vendors. All this means massive scalability and industrial control power and performance.
Licensing/sales/support
The Prophet team offer support online or by telephone in three time zones across the globe. Where needed, consultancy support is readily available from SunGard and a number of leading consultancies.
The Prophet system is continually being developed to meet the changing market, regulatory and IT landscapes facing our customers. Updates and new releases are issued regularly.
Types of user
Actuaries are the principal users of Prophet across the full range of functions: pricing, reporting and risk management. However risk officers and financial reporting executives of an insurer will all typically end up being users of the output from Prophet.
Areas/countries with the most users
Prophet is now used by over 7,000 users in more than 500 implementations around the world in most developed insurance markets.
Contact person and details
Steven Armstrong, prophet.helpdesk@sungard.com
Channels:Software - IT
Companies:SunGard