FIS: Helping insurers stay agile whatever happens
Martin Sarjeant, head of insurance risk solutions management and strategy at FIS, explains why the provider’s Insurance Risk Suite actuarial modelling solution (formerly known as Prophet) is unique
What are insurers’ biggest concerns now and how is FIS helping them?
A big concern for insurers is operational resiliency. Obviously, the last 18 months have tested the strength of many insurers’ operations. Some things worked and some did not. FIS has many insurance solutions and many of them help insurers with operational resiliency. These range from our digital payment solutions, to image capture and workflow solutions, through to our managed cloud risk solution.
It is clear insurers are accelerating towards digital payments and an online presence and the cloud. FIS is there to help in all aspects, from being a solution and services provider, and offering the right skills for each project.
What insurance technology trends does FIS see in the market now and in the future?
Cloud has been the technology we’ve all relied on for the last 18 months, both for office and personal work, whether that’s been using Zoom, Netflix or Teams. We are waiting for the time when face-to-face meetings can replace these tools, but cloud solutions came into their own in 2020, and are here to stay.
We have nearly 100 financial groups on our managed cloud service, and through the pandemic, this has provided insurers with flexibility for their risk models, enabling them to access their work anywhere, anytime.
Our 2021 readiness report showed 83% of insurers are looking to move their risk management to the cloud. And we’ve seen a massive acceleration in companies wanting to move to the public cloud.
What are the advantages for insurers to using FIS Insurance Risk Suite?
Insurance Risk Suite is fairly unique as it supports life, health, pensions, financial services and non-life modelling in a single platform. The solution is proven and established, with more than 1,000 clients in 85 countries and we’ve hosted clients in the cloud for over a decade.
One of the key advantages is our extensive and region-specific libraries of actuarial, investment and corporate calculations, which not only contain code for local insurance products, but local regulations and calculations, such as IFRS 17 and Solvency II.
This leads to a very rapid implementation and means our solution is extremely flexible. This really helped insurers update assumptions and, where necessary, formulas during the pandemic in a controlled way.
What updates does FIS plan to make over the next year?
We launched our cloud services seven years ago and as insurers review operational resiliency, we may see a lot more existing and new clients move to the cloud solution. So, it is rightly a large focus for us to ensure we continue to improve the service and support we offer clients.
Insurers are demanding systems with strong governance and flexibility, and are looking at ways to lower costs as they emerge from the pandemic.
A lot of the drivers for selecting risk systems are the same as they always were, but scalability, remote access and flexibility to update models quickly in a controlled way are now even more important.
We will continue to improve our system, listen to our clients and keep pace with clients’ needs.
Overall, no new products are being launched in the short term. Instead, we are making continuous improvements to our end-to-end solution.
Given Insurance Risk Suite is already a single platform for modelling both life and general insurance, how do you deliver to the individual needs of each business?
Insurance Risk Suite at its core is a calculation engine capable of performing complex calculations efficiently and robustly. These calculations can reflect the needs of life and general insurance business, long and short term. It’s about recognising both the commonalities and the differences.
The calculation library structure of Insurance Risk Suite means we can provide individual libraries of mathematics relevant to the different lines of business to exactly meet each need.
This not only provides the functionality needed in a single platform, but maintains any required separation and compartmentalisation that can benefit different users and parts of the business, so each can focus on the complexities of their line of business.
