RPC Consulting's financial modelling platform, Tyche, delivers the speed, functionality and open integration that insurers need, according to the software solution provider's managing partner, Alun Marriott
How is technology changing the actuarial modelling sector?
Technology is empowering change, but this change can introduce hidden costs unless managed carefully, particularly when maintaining a disparate suite of tools or freeware from multiple vendors that poorly integrate. This has led insurers to seek solutions that more seamlessly integrate. Our Tyche platform addresses this head on – underpinning several components of an insurer's workflow – from data cleansing, pricing, reserving and valuation, capital modelling and accumulation roll-up to an insurer's downstream reporting needs.
Tyche's singular architecture has been designed to ensure such data flows and analytics are easily shared via common syntax, paradigm and API. This integration is particularly important for composites where a firm-wide view is essential.
Technology is also at work in the life sector. Policy valuation systems have been subject to systematic and incremental development in response to commercial pressures, leading to disjointed and unwieldy architecture. This has led to a resurgence in spreadsheet-based modelling, with the associated operational risks this entails. We've released a new tool, the Tyche Model Generator, to allow clients to continue to work with their policy valuation spreadsheets, yet automatically synchronising to a production-ready Tyche representation, thereby greatly improving transparency and performance.
What benefits does cloud technology bring insurers?
Insurance analytics presents unique challenges for the modeller – not least the need to maintain an understanding of the dependency between elements of risk across a large number of simulations or policies.
This dependency can lead to processing "pinch points" that make cloud analysis of these very large datasets extremely difficult. To solve this problem, we have developed a new and unique technology, Tyche Hive™ that invisibly and cost effectively removes these pinch points and helps insurers work with previously unparalleled granularity. Tyche Hive™ treats the cloud as a single machine – enabling models to grow in complexity whilst maintaining near linear resource scalability.
It is worth stressing that Tyche's innate power already reduces the amount of cloud resources that any particular solution may need. For example, clients can now take their capital model and life projection and valuation models and project them forward to allow real-time intelligent business planning.
What is RPC Consulting's business strategy for 2020?
We're delighted to have recently opened our first US office in Chicago under the leadership of Dustin Duncan and will continue to expand where clients most need our services.
We're also delighted to work alongside our network of industry-leading consultants and technology partners, whose delivery capabilities are augmented by our Tyche platform.
Our strategy also remains one of technical excellence and ever-extending Tyche's raw processing power. For example, Tyche's Capital Model can sit within Tyche's numerical optimiser to simultaneously model both inwards business and outwards reinsurance for business planning. The volume of calculations is vast, yet runtimes of minutes are possible.
What new services is RPC Consulting developing?
We've recently extended Tyche's in-built auto-documentation and testing suite to really help our clients build and maintain robust and auditable models. We're also seeing increasing demand for automated reserving processes, perhaps triggered by the looming IFRS 17 regime. Clients are opting to use Tyche as it empowers an in-house team to own the process flow with transparent and auditable calculations.
Where clients use Tyche for both capital and reserving, this facilitates, for example, the setting of reserve risk within the capital team. Over recent years, we've also invested over 70 man-years building a standalone commercial lines pricing system known as the Tyche Pricing System (TPS). TPS is a globally deployed, scalable and customisable web application that prices a wide range of commercial lines contracts through a production-grade infrastructure – and is based on an underlying Tyche architecture. TPS's ability to customise screens and actuarial methods ensures it keeps pace when new risks need pricing.
