My Actuarial Working Life

I started looking for a replacement Visual FoxPro ("VFP") since 2013, especially I noticed that Microsoft is going to cease its support on VFP 9.0 (released in 2004 and updated in 2007) after 13 January 2015. Although such technical support is not a concern to me (I never requested any support from Microsoft during my more than 10 years of experience using VFP for my actuarial work), I noticed that it would be more and more difficult for me to convince my clients (those who are not existing VFP users) to consider VFP in designing solutions for them. When I did my research on the website, I came across many names that I was totally not familiar… Is " Lightswitch " mentioned in the official VFP website suitable? After studying its features, I concluded that it is perhaps a good application for an IT programmer, but it is too much for me in handling actuarial work. Basically, what I need in my work is to manipulate and analyze data, ideally using common programming l...

If you are a frequent Prophet user, you must be definitely familiar with "Model Point Files" ("MPF"), i.e. the policy data that you compile in a specific format that Prophet can recognize as inputs for Prophet runs. If my guess is right, most probably you use Data Conversion System ("DCS") to convert the source data you download from your policy administration system (may be in various format, e.g. fixed ASCII / fixed width, comma delimited, tab delimited, etc.) into the required MPF, based on the definitions you specified in your DCS programs. In case your source data are divided into various files, you may need to carry out more steps to prepare MPF, for example: Open different source files in Excel Combine required fields from different source files by using commands (such as) VLOOKUP, SUMIF & MATCH. You may have automated this process by using VBA. Convert the required files into text files Use DCS to convert those text files into MPF  How...

Figure 1 : File Layout for a Source Text File Do you ever think of using Excel or other spreadsheet application to help you to write your FoxPro program? Yes, when you need to write a set of tedious coding, you may find out Excel may be a great helper to you. For example, in order to convert a source text file into DBF format, I need to create a table structure based on the file layout of the text file (just like Figure 1). However, the problem is the text file consists of 200+ fields - I would definitely look stupid if I copy the field names & field properties one-by-one into the SQL coding. Your guess is right, I completed the relevant coding ( CREATE TABLE (Field1 C(1),Field2 C(8),...) ) within a few minutes by using Excel. Let me share with you how I did the coding: STEP 1:   Copy the file layout to Excel Figure 2: Copy file layout to Excel I copied field name, field type and field width from file layout Word document and pasted value into Excel. Of cou...

I started to learn FoxPro when I started my first actuarial career after graduating from the university. My mentor in the actuarial department, Madam L, was also my FoxPro  shifu (i.e. master / teacher / guru). Madam L was the reinsurance administrator in the department - by using FoxPro, she managed to do necessary reinsurance administration work for the entire individual life insurance business (more than 1 million policies) by her own, alone ! By going through her programs and guidances, I picked up necessary skills to use FoxPro and create FoxPro programs for my reporting and experience studies tasks (my manager resigned three month after I joined the department - all his tasks became my tasks!) - until now I am still grateful to the guidance she provided to me previously. When I was promoted to a team leader with junior staffs, similarly I needed to teach them the relevant FoxPro knowledge so that they had necessary skills to do the assigned tasks. At that time, there ...

Recently when I helped my client to set up process to compile movement of certificate statistics (MOP) (i.e. new business, in force and termination/alteration), I advised them that Excel is not an ideal tool to do such actuarial exercise which requires a lot of data manipulation. "Then what is the better tool?" They asked me. Without any hesitation, I answered: " FoxPro ". Why do I recommend FoxPro as a good tool to be used for actuarial exercises that require a lot of data manipulation & matching (such as MOP reporting, experience studies and reinsurance administration)? What are Excel, MS Access or Data Conversion System (DCS) (a supplementary application comes together with Prophet) not considered good tools for actuarial exercise? Among the reasons are: Ability to do data matching / joining - as FoxPro uses SQL (Structured Query Language) as the primary programming language, we can combine the selected fields from 2 different tables/data easily base...