Aon Benfield has launched an edition of its risk and capital modelling system ReMetrica aimed at addressing the wider aspects of the modelling process.
"Whereas ReMetrica supported the calculation kernel, [the Ultimate edition] is now supporting activities around the kernel: data preparation, report preparation, etc. In IT-speak, it's a much greater part of the solution stack," said Paul Maitland, head of risk software.
The Ultimate edition sits alongside the Runtime, Professional and Enterprise flavours of ReMetrica, and is an evolution of the earlier Team edition.
Users will have to pay extra to upgrade to the Ultimate edition, but Maitland said: "We are expecting quite a few existing clients to upgrade and we can see a significant number of new clients signing up to Ultimate edition," to take advantage of the features that support team working on capital models and automation of workflows.
The Ultimate edition has tools to enable greater collaboration on model development, such as version control and multi-user access, which will bring the "discipline of software engineering into the capital modelling world," according to Maitland.
The other major advance is the ability to automate production using a visual, non-programming approach. "You can build workflows to run all your simulations. If you're running multiple models, with results from one feeding into the next, you can automate that process," Maitland said. The system will also produce a complete audit trail for all model runs.
"This is a major advance in functionality for us. We have fundamentally rewritten how the software can be used," he added.
The Ultimate edition should appeal to smaller and larger-scale users, Maitland said. Among the first adopters are a multinational insurer with subsidiaries in roughly 30 countries, but another is a corporate captive. "It's ideal for management of the capital modelling process, whether the teams are small or multinational."