Reinsurance broker Aon Benfield has announced the introduction of an integrated enterprise High Performance Computing (HPC) business platform as a framework to financial reporting – PathWise Solutions Group IFRS.
Pathwise enables businesses to simultaneously model assets, liabilities, and scenario generators – enabling easier management and reporting of complex financial and biometric risks.
The platform is already being used for IFRS 17 purposes by one of the three largest life insurance companies in South Korea – Kyobo Life Insurance.
Peter Phillips, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of PathWise Solutions Group, said; “The platform was the first of its kind in the insurance industry. Having been recently licensed by Kyobo Life, PathWise is enabling Kyobo to achieve significant gains in the speed and efficiency of its financial reporting, risk management processes, new product development and variable product hedging activities.”
The new IFRS 17 accounting standard for insurance contracts requires companies to improve their valuation systems and processes – specifically in data management, model management, and computational power for actuarial and asset and liability projections.
Pathwise’s HPC software runs on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) – making it faster than other legacy systems running Central Processing Units (CPUs) – for all the new calculations required under the IFRS 17 standard.
Bae Woo Soon, Chief Actuary at Kyobo Life, commented on the firm’s use of PathWise, which is replacing Kyobo’s exisiting reserve valuation tool with its fully automated system; “PathWise has greatly reduced the requirement for manual operations, while improving accuracy and efficiency. Prior to implementing PathWise as our company-wide IFRS 17 actuarial system, we relied on multiple solutions to support our financial reporting processes.
“Using PathWise, we have been consolidating these components into a single controlled system, resulting in huge gains in speed and efficiency for the models that have been migrated.
“In fact, the PathWise platform proved hundreds of times faster than our legacy CPU solution for valuing traditional blocks of business, reduced variable block valuation run times from 18 hours to less than two hours compared to our legacy GPU based solution, and consolidated more than 200 products into three concise models. We now have the aim of eventually transferring all our products onto PathWise.”
Phillips added: “It has been our pleasure to partner with Kyobo Life to develop the insurance industry’s first IFRS 17 platform. Kyobo recognized the importance of properly managing its risks under IFRS 17, and required a quickly deployable, customizable and comprehensive integrated business platform with very strong audit controls.
“PathWise provides a single, cost-effective scalable solution that meets all of Kyobo Life’s risk management standards, satisfies the firm’s financial and regulatory reporting needs, and enhances its asset liability management capabilities.”
