My Actuarial Working Life

If you are working in the actuarial department of an insurance company, it may not be uncommon to you involving in various testing exercises, which are known as User Acceptance Testing ("UAT") in general. Some of us may think that UAT is only applicable to the policy administration system implementation project (Oops... Do I remind on the non-stop follow-ups from your Project Manager?), but in fact UAT is also needed for the programs, spreadsheet templates or actuarial model we use to perform various actuarial studies - whether they are developed internally or by external consultant. It is particularly important for those tools which we are going to use to perform regular studies. In my view, there is no one right answer for the approach to be used in performing UAT on program / spreadsheet / model - most importantly, the approach that you adopt should allow the required testing to be carried out in a structured manner, and it should not create too much "processes...

SCENARIO: Mr. A, the head of valuation team of Company X, was struggling on how to manage his Prophet workspaces. Due to various constraints (time constraints, resource constraints, ...) in the past, his team ended up using multiple Prophet workspaces in performing valuation exercises - which incurred extra time & efforts in completing required studies. To make the matter worse, some workspaces were actually having the same products (well, the oldest workspace was used to calculate statutory reserves and the latest workspace was used to calculate IFRS reserves...) - his team needed to prepare different sets of model point files for these workspaces because the variables used to read model model point files having different names! The Chief Actuary was unhappy with this inefficiency in managing workspaces. He requested Mr. A to work out a way to consolidate the workspaces into one workspace, or at least lesser workspaces. The problem is, the Prophet Manager couldn't allocate ...

Finally it comes the time to prepare for actuarial valuation work for new financial year 2013. I think it is the correct time for me to share my proposal to one of my clients, Actuarial Department of Company A ,  in order to improve how they can manage their valuation Prophet workspaces. Existing Approach Apart from monthly valuation (i.e. computing statutory reserves), Company A performed various valuation exercises, such as market-consistent embedded value ("MCEV"), on regular basis. Currently, they use a centralized Prophet valuation workspaces for all sorts of valuation exercises, which designated run numbers are assigned to different types of exercises. In order to segregate runs for different valuation months, the Prophet workspace is duplicated every month (including the relevant tables) into a new folder. Of course, all workspaces are saved in a designated drive in the server. Although there are some advantages using this approach, I do share with Company A...