Actuarial Data Automation : A Modern Approach for Legacy System

Actuarial Data Automation : A Modern Approach for Legacy System

Success Story & Case Study: ABC AccountSubmitter details

Objective of the Presentation/PosterWe are going to discuss the success story of ABC project, that how IBM have provide automation solution to Actuarial team for their data need & reduced their dependency over IT team & increased productivity, Also how we can provide the same solution to other Insurance legacy applications to efficiently provide Actuarial data.

1. Automate process so that actuarial can directly access the application data for their analytics calculation.

2. Move & refine data from various mainframe sources into a data warehouse supplying all of the Actuarial team needs.

3. Reduce time actuarial & development team are spending on data manipulation & cleansing.

4. Provide Reserve & Valuation Calculations/Algorithms to Actuarial team which is happening in existing programs for summarized reports.

5. Reduce the dependency over application support team & extracts can be easily done by Actuarial team using ORACLE database & simple queries(SQL).

Description of the topic

An actuary is a business professional who deals with the financial impact of risk and uncertainty & they need lot of customers data to focus on their complexity, mathematics, mechanisms & Business Analytics. But Actuarial needs are not always a top priority and , IT spend has typically been focused on marketing and admin systems, Now there is not much gap between the modern actuarial & IT Professionals, Software is a key part of day-to-day work for actuaries, specially e-mail, spreadsheets, databases & SQL.

As most of the Insurance data are running in mainframe computers & all Legacy mainframe applications used VSAM & flat files to store their data, now this creates gap between the application data & actuarial as data can be accessed by the mainframe professionals only.

IBM helped Insurance Co to provide the interface between the legacy & open source; So that Actuarial can directly access the customer data for their predictive modeling & analytics need along with the detail Reserve & Valuation computing solutions extracted from old COBOL & Assembler programs.Previous State1. Existing generated reports for Actuarial were summarized & not in the policy level.2. Actuarial used to request flat file extracts from the application support team having expertise on Mainframes 3. Actuarial team has to request & wait for each extracts for their actuarial calculations & data need for analytics.4. Lot of extracted data requires significant edits for their feed, which was time consuming.

5. Most of the time extracted reports were same with minimal differences, still requires effort of new program to populate data from the Mainframe files.

6. Lot of Actuarial related Reserve & Valuation calculations are done by the existing programs, But Actuarial were not aware of those calculations because of very old applications & lack of documentation.Solution 1. IBM team have analyzed Actuarial need & data requirement to load into ORACLE database.

2. ETL Developed by IBM team to move data from admin application to warehouse (Oracle DB).

3. IBM have provided business objects based on query capabilities to actuarial so they can prototype their data extract needs.

4. Created DB load files by converting non display formats into display format & introduced more Reserve & Valuation calculated fields to minimize Actuarial efforts. Benefits

1. Automation has reduced dependency, time consuming process & standardize on data usage to reduce errors.

2. Actuarial can directly access the database & run their own queries for their analytic calculations. 3. Process has provided direct Reserve & valuation fields on policy level to minimize Actuarial effort & errors.4. Minimized request log of application support team & need of repetitive work to create extracts.

5. Helped Actuarial & IT team to better understand the old Reserve & Valuation process & to revalidate everything.6. Converted many days process into few minutes process by simply executing queries directly into the ORACLE Database by Actuarial.IBM can provide similar solutions to other legacy mainframe applications to help Actuarial with improved data & process to extract that information without having any dependency over the application support team, This will act as a interface between the legacy & open source systems, Overall process also includes addition of required Reserve & Valuation fields to reduce actuarial efforts