Montoux: Actuarial expertise combined with automation
Stephen Carlin, strategy product manager at US-headquartered solutions provider, Montoux, explains how its cloud-native technology can free up actuarial resources and automate processes for life and health insurers
How can Montoux’s technology help life and health insurers?
The heart of what we do is our actuarial automation platform. The philosophy behind it is we think actuaries spend far too much of their time working around the limitations of the software they use.
We want to give actuaries the tools to unleash their potential to do much more strategic and value-added work, rather than handle-turning and operational work.
Currently, traditional actuarial work very much overlaps with data engineering, data science and data analytics. The platform we have built brings together the ability to do data engineering, data science and use artificial intelligence, as well as the ability to do core actuarial modelling, and wrap that up with automation.
What technology trends do you expect to shape the life and health insurance market?
The big trends are cloud technology, automation and data. These have been major topics over the past few years, and they will continue to be big trends going forward.
What you see now is that companies that are navigating this environment are starting to gain significant commercial traction.
Underwriting and claims processing are two of the areas where we have probably seen some of the biggest advances with machine learning and artificial intelligence accelerating those processes, and particularly in the property and casualty insurance space.
We are also starting to see a lot more traction from life insurers trying to adopt those technologies and techniques.
How do you expect actuarial risk modelling to change in the next five years?
One of the other things we expect to see over the next few years is insurers re-evaluating their processes and systems. They have been in “project mode” for at least 10 or 15 years and there has been a focus on having something that works in time for deadlines. As the focus shifts from the last round of go-live updates for regulatory-driven changes like LDTI or IFRS 17, hopefully insurers will get the time to take a breath and consider whether the kit they are using is what they want to use in the long term.
What advantages can cloud technology offer life and health insurers?
The early forays into the cloud very much focused on computational scaling. But this is really only scratching the surface of what cloud can do. It can deliver insurers a lot more agility, the ability to scale-up capacity, on-board new technology or the ability to analyse a bigger data set. The cloud therefore offers great flexibility
You will start to see a much bigger differentiation between systems that were developed to be cloud native, versus the early “lift and shift” models.
What insurance technology improvements has Montoux offered insurers in the last year?
We are architected on the Amazon Web Services platform and we have worked very closely with the Amazon team to take advantage of the latest and greatest services available.
One of the biggest costs for an insurer has been in migrating from one actuarial risk modeller to another, so we are doing a lot of work to streamline that process.
We have built a proprietary modelling language, which means that, combined with some of our cloud-native enterprise functionality, we offer flexibility to create models within a robust control framework.
Also, we have much more of a workflow view of the world and not just a focus on core modelling. We therefore provide end-to-end automation capability.
