International General Insurance Holdings (IGI) has revealed it has undergone a major change program, which it says has future-proofed its risk, capital and actuarial modelling capabilities.
The insurer, which has a wholly-owned subsidiary in the UK and operations across Bermuda and the EMEA region, published a whitepaper yesterday which detailed an overhaul of its quantitative analytics platforms, which the firm described as a bid to bring its risk and actuarial functions “back into the heart of underwriting.”
According to IGI, while regulations such as Solvency II and IFRS17 have put the spotlight on risk, capital and actuarial modelling, with insurers working to embed wider risk management and governance capabilities, a side effect of that has been the creation of “risk functions, risk departments, risk policies, terms of reference, hugely complicated models, and a tangled web of ineffective analytics.”
Simon Spurr, IGI’s group head of risk and capital management, spoke to Insurance Business about what drove the firm to roll out the changes.
“Within IGI, as in many companies, both the risk and actuarial functions had evolved organically with a focus on successfully meeting regulatory and board expectations for ensuring sound governance of the business,” he said.
“The combination of increasing complexity of external demands, coupled with a legacy capital model and an actuarial function relying on end-user computing, stopped them from delivering real tangible value add to the business.”
IGI’s senior management believed that such demands would only increase going forward, and that without significant investment, the functions would be consigned to a future of “just getting by” while the world around moved on, according to Spurr.
“In late 2016, our COO Hatem Jabsheh initiated a step change, and through 2017 led the charge to hire the right people and provide them with the resources and support to implement the tools and technologies to bring about this change,” he said.
“The whitepaper chronicles the journey to date and showcases the two incredible technologies implemented during 2017. It provides insight into the benefits already being delivered, and hints at the exciting potential of the technologies going forward. While still early days in the IGI transformation journey, as the authors say – “abh abh” – or “piece by piece.””
The paper provides details on the two technologies that IGI is using to transform its risk and actuarial functions: Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC) ‘Tyche’ stochastic modelling, and Dynamo Analytics ‘Psicle’ end-to-end analytics and robotic process automation.
“A process that took days to complete now takes a matter of minutes,” said Sunnie Luthra, IGI’s risk and capital actuary. “This has freed up our skilled actuaries to perform deep analytics for all the individual portfolios.”
