4 ms·

It seems like a nice and modern stack to work with. Anything on adoption in the industry? It's a niche market with firms very-very reluctant to switch software

by wjnc 11y ago

It seems like a nice and modern stack to work with. Anything on adoption in the industry? It's a niche market with firms very-very reluctant to switch software and very-very long development cycles. Some googling led me to Edlund, which from their '14 annual report seems a mainly Danish firm [1]. [1] https://www.edlund.dk/sites/default/files/Downloads/annual-report_2014.pdf https://www.edlund.dk/sites/default/files/Downloads/annual-r...

BillinghamJ 11y ago
I'm busy building a new insurance company called Cuvva. Initially, we had planned to work with the existing software platforms, as we had assumed it would be too difficult to build the stack ourselves. But their terms were completely financially untenable for our model. Additionally, they have never supported a truly mobile insurance platform before, so we were concerned that it wouldn't deliver the experience we wanted. So we ended up building everything from scratch. It took less time than we were quoted by the various software houses, at about a fifth of the cost. We couldn't be happier with how it has turned out.
- wjnc 11y ago
  Life or SLT business? Then I'm truly impressed. Any links? P&C on the backend is imho a few orders of magnitude simpler (although I enjoy the statistics there more). 30 to 50 year complex contracts and then try to manage your market risks. Edit: sorry, you mentioned the name. Nice idea! I guess you are so far away from traditional products you actually stand a chance. (For readers from other sectors: Market is cut throat and multiline insurera have lower capital requirements so new monoline in Europe is practically impossible.) You'll have contracts running for hours, not decades ;)
  - BillinghamJ 11y ago
    Hourly/on-demand motor :) Helps enable people in the UK to borrow their friends' cars (which is often illegal here). There are a few more complexities in motor insurance which don't exist in other verticals also.
jmartinpetersen 11y ago
As far as I know this (Actulus) is still primarily a research product in search of real world customers. Edlund primarily has customers in the danish labour market pension sector, and was recently acquired by KMD (a largeish danish it company).
pvitz 11y ago
At least in Western Europe, the big insurance companies are using mostly (Willis) Towers Watson's Moses (or are changing to Risk Agility FM) or Sungard's Prophet. License fees are very high and everyone is basically locked in, because the models get developed over many years. From my experience, the models aren't efficient. On one hand, the developers are very often actuaries without much understanding of efficient programming. On the other hand, the underlying software is old and doesn't take modern possibilities into account. So, instead of taking a big risk and developing a new software themselves, almost everybody is buying more physical machines for their hpc clusters.
- wjnc 11y ago
  Yeah, I am from the industry as well. We just keep piling on more machines for Prophet, with pretty nasty runtimes. But you know whats harder? Splitsing development between actuaries and programmers
  - pvitz 11y ago
    In my former job, we did the same. About splitting: It is at least in Moses/Rafm a big problem to have many people working on the same model. It seems like TW has never heard something about version control systems, and their newest team edition is a big joke...

by wjnc 11y ago

BillinghamJ 11y ago

I'm busy building a new insurance company called Cuvva. Initially, we had planned to work with the existing software platforms, as we had assumed it would be too difficult to build the stack ourselves. But their terms were completely financially untenable for our model. Additionally, they have never supported a truly mobile insurance platform before, so we were concerned that it wouldn't deliver the experience we wanted. So we ended up building everything from scratch. It took less time than we were quoted by the various software houses, at about a fifth of the cost. We couldn't be happier with how it has turned out.

wjnc 11y ago
Life or SLT business? Then I'm truly impressed. Any links? P&C on the backend is imho a few orders of magnitude simpler (although I enjoy the statistics there more). 30 to 50 year complex contracts and then try to manage your market risks. Edit: sorry, you mentioned the name. Nice idea! I guess you are so far away from traditional products you actually stand a chance. (For readers from other sectors: Market is cut throat and multiline insurera have lower capital requirements so new monoline in Europe is practically impossible.) You'll have contracts running for hours, not decades ;)
- BillinghamJ 11y ago
  Hourly/on-demand motor :) Helps enable people in the UK to borrow their friends' cars (which is often illegal here). There are a few more complexities in motor insurance which don't exist in other verticals also.

jmartinpetersen 11y ago

As far as I know this (Actulus) is still primarily a research product in search of real world customers. Edlund primarily has customers in the danish labour market pension sector, and was recently acquired by KMD (a largeish danish it company).

pvitz 11y ago

At least in Western Europe, the big insurance companies are using mostly (Willis) Towers Watson's Moses (or are changing to Risk Agility FM) or Sungard's Prophet. License fees are very high and everyone is basically locked in, because the models get developed over many years. From my experience, the models aren't efficient. On one hand, the developers are very often actuaries without much understanding of efficient programming. On the other hand, the underlying software is old and doesn't take modern possibilities into account. So, instead of taking a big risk and developing a new software themselves, almost everybody is buying more physical machines for their hpc clusters.

wjnc 11y ago
Yeah, I am from the industry as well. We just keep piling on more machines for Prophet, with pretty nasty runtimes. But you know whats harder? Splitsing development between actuaries and programmers
- pvitz 11y ago
  In my former job, we did the same. About splitting: It is at least in Moses/Rafm a big problem to have many people working on the same model. It seems like TW has never heard something about version control systems, and their newest team edition is a big joke...