Best stress scenarios software, Milliman Mind
In a world where the universe of risks is ever expanding, insurers need a structured way to identify a range of identifiable possible outcomes, their impacts and how to deal with them.
Stress testing enables firms to test the sensitivity of their liabilities and assets to a range of scenarios. The findings can then generate ideas on how to grow the business or position it to avoid potential losses.
Our judges declared Milliman Mind this year's winner of best stress scenarios software for its ability to help insurers achieve those goals.
Milliman developed Mind as a cloud-based modelling solution for reducing the model risk arising from spreadsheet models. The system automatically converts Excel-based models to C# models, and allows the user to add stochastic dimensions to deterministic Excel models in order to produce a distribution of results.
Pierre Miehe, head of Milliman Mind, explains that Solvency II and IFRS 17 both require firms to test a range of scenarios for their balance sheets.
He says: "Solvency II imposes 20 stress tests on the liabilities of all insurers in Europe. For some insurers, this can be a huge burden and takes days to run."
A key capability of Mind is its dashboards, which enables users to drill down through scenarios and understand how the assumptions change the result.
Miehe adds that Mind can handle stress test models that take up hundreds of gigabytes with no issue, whereas Excel can only manage up to 300 megabytes. He also claims Mind is 40-80 times faster for stress scenario testing than Excel.
Among Mind's users are two of the largest reinsurers in the world and a large bancassurer.
Asked about the strategy for 2020, Miehe says functionality specific for reinsurers will be added because Mind is selling well to this market.
The automation of processes – where stress tests can be run automatically with some decisions made without any human intervention – is another area of focus this year.
