To truly earn the title of "data solution of the year", a provider must be able to show how it transforms raw data into meaningful financial results and risk metrics.

That sums up why the judges voted for FIS's Prophet Data Management Platform. They called it a "practical solution showing great integration benefits".

Available both on-premise and as a cloud-managed service, FIS says Prophet manages actuarial data and transforms these outputs in ways the wider business or external bodies will understand.

The capability to make business sense of complex data is especially relevant with the implementation of the upcoming IFRS 17 accounting standard. FIS says its Insurance Data Repository (IDR) comes with an IFRS 17 toolkit giving users a template for handling data and results as part of an IFRS 17 reporting exercise.

Commenting on the data implications of IFRS 17, Oscar Weafer, director of risk solutions management and strategy at FIS, says IFRS 17 requires further integration between actuarial and financial systems and involves retaining data for subsequent measurements in future periods.

Weafer says: "So we have greater volumes of data that must be stored safely and retrieved at future dates for calculation purposes, as well as increased volumes of data that must be output from actuarial systems and consumed by the finance team."

He adds FIS has designed its software to allow insurers to minimise the volumes of data being used during the calculation process.

"The Insurance Data Repository allows for separation of the two types of output data providing permanent storage for that information required for the calculations, while also making available, in the required format, that which is needed further along the chain.

"This single repository can also be used for business intelligence and the FIS offering thereby supports multiple views on the same data set," says Weafer.

FIS's ability to keep its data management capabilities current also caught the judges' attention, as can be seen in the release of its flexible results module in 2019, which adds the power of distributed databases to the Prophet platform.

Asked if insurers can ever keep on top of increasing amounts of data, Weafer says: "Actuarial modellers will always push for finer granularity, more simulations, and more complex calculations to gain a greater understanding of the business and to have confidence in their numbers.

"But we are now seeing increasing interest from other stakeholders in the data that can be generated and this has led to unprecedented demands on output from actuarial models."