iWorks Prophet

Industry Events

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:46:53 +0100

Upcoming Industry Events

iWorks Prophet hosts and attends a number of industry tradeshows and regional events throughout each year to help stay connected with our customers. Come and meet the team at any of the following upcoming industry events.

SOA

Annual Meeting and Exhibition

17-20 October 2010

Hilton, New York, USA

The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is the largest professional organisation dedicated to serving 21,000 actuarial members and the public in the United States, Canada and worldwide. They are holding their Annual Meeting and exhibition from 17-20 October 2010 in New York. iWorks Prophet and ARC will have a stand there. For more information on the event, click here

Life Conference

Collateral damage - Life insurance after the credit crunch 2010 and looking forward

7-9 November 2010

ICC, Birmingham, UK

iWorks Prophet - Stand P8

Attended by more than 900 delegates, the Life Conference is arguably the premier professional event in the UK for life actuaries. The programme includes a range of technical matters incorporating Solvency II and beyond, as well as softer skills and professionalism topics; wider issues affecting the life insurance industry are also covered. The conference is open to all professionals interested in this sector, as well as actuaries who work in life insurance. This year’s conference will take place at the ICC, Birmingham. For more information click here

If you have any questions or comments relating to any iWorks events, please contact lara.sparkes@sungard.com

User Meetings

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:29:02 +0100

Upcoming Prophet User Group Meetings

Prophet licensed customers are invited to join us for a customer meeting scheduled in various places around the world. Prophet User Group Meetings are usually high level and for that reason are mainly intended to interest our actuarial main contacts, Actuarial Managers, Chief Actuaries, CRO’s and CFO’s. However, actuarial teams are also invited. These meetings are free to attend and a detailed agenda and exact location for each meeting will be sent a few weeks prior to each event.

Zurich User Group Meeting - 8^th September 2010 – Venue in Zurich tbc – Register here
New York User Group Meeting – 17^th October 2010 – Venue in NYC tbc – Register here
London User Group Meeting – 24^th November 2010 – Venue in London tbc – Register here

If you have any questions or comments relating to any iWorks events, please contact lara.sparkes@sungard.com

Webinars

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:27:15 +0100

Upcoming Prophet Webinars

We would be delighted if you could join us for our customer webinars, where we will keep you informed about important Prophet updates. These will be repeated twice on the same day to accommodate worldwide time zones. During the webinar we will be using both conference call and VoIP; please use the one that you find the most convenient.

Asset Liability Strategy Library 7.3.5

The latest ALS (Asset Liability Strategy) Library was released in April 2010. The release focused on usability, auditability and robustness, as well as more detailed documentation.

This webinar will describe the enhancements made in ALS 7.3.5, including a number of structural changes made to support future releases and the use of new systems features with the platform. The webinar will also cover the plans for the next release of ALS.

7th September 2010 0930 UK – Register here
7th September 2010 1530 UK – Register here
Password – Prophet

Copies of the presentation slides will be available after our webinars. You can request them from prophet.helpdesk@sungard.com

If you have any questions or comments relating to any iWorks events, please contact lara.sparkes@sungard.com

Quality Assurance

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 03:42:33 +0100

Acceptance testing is not about bug hunting or ‘breaking’ the software; it is about testing your requirements in real life conditions. Prophet solutions are provided to you having undergone the most rigorous of testing but now you must be prepared to ensure that Prophet satisfies your end user requirements, IT governance and regulatory demands.

SunGard’s proven Acceptance Testing methodology will provide you and your IT Department with the confidence that all necessary quality control conditions have been satisfied.

As the experts in Prophet, and with vast experience of implementations, we can help you to mitigate the risk of systems change in the most efficient manner possible.

Acceptance Testing datasheet

US GAAP

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:04:53 +0100

Whether needed to deal with local reporting, or for providing information to a US parent company, a surprisingly large number of financial organizations need to report on a US GAAP basis.

US Clients

Together with our partner Actuarial Resources Corporation, iWorks Prophet brings you a US library capable of modelling cash-flows for all common US products and statutory, tax and GAAP reserving. This can be used for wider risk management when incorporated with other Prophet libraries.

International Clients

A number of clients have purchased the iWorks Prophet US GAAP modules, which add long-term US GAAP reporting functionality into their existing libraries. These modules offer a breadth of features and reporting options covering the different FAS requirements.

Companies new to US GAAP reporting should seek specialist consulting advice before implementing these libraries.

Actuarial Resources Corporation
Telephone: +1 (913) 451 0044
Helpdesk email: prophet@arcval.com

Proxy Modelling

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:48:16 +0100

Proxy models are typically used when calculations need to be performed significantly faster than is otherwise possible, for example by several orders of magnitude. In these cases, simpler models offer the speed gain at the cost of an acceptable level of approximation on the result. Different techniques apply within different countries, based on the reporting requirements and characteristics of the products.

Within the iWorks Prophet suite of applications, a number of tools are available for performing proxy type modelling. These include:

Flex Modelling

The Asset Liability Strategy library offers a flexing approach to modelling the liabilities. In this case the cash-flows from a detailed deterministic model are passed into the ALM model, and based on the known behaviours of the company, the cash-flows are adjusted to allow for changes in economic conditions or similar.

Replicating Portfolios

The iWorks Prophet Replicating Portfolio module helps find portfolios of assets that match the cash-flows from a set of liabilities. There are many uses for replicating portfolios in insurance, such as: proxy models which can be run much faster, performance attribution, linking to other asset systems and assistance in formulating hedging strategies. The asset and liability cash-flows used can either be created within iWorks Prophet or from external sources. The module is very flexible allowing multiple constraints including non-linear and custom constraints. As the module is integrated into iWorks Prophet, it offers the same benefits to the end user in terms of flexibility, auditability and controls. Integration with Excel provides reporting and analysis dashboards.

Acceptance Testing

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:47:03 +0100

SunGard’s proven Acceptance Testing methodology will provide you and your IT Department with the confidence that all necessary quality control conditions have been satisfied.

As the experts in Prophet, and with vast experience of implementations, we can help you to mitigate the risk of systems change in the most efficient manner possible.

Acceptance Testing datasheet

Prophet Project Management Services

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:46:19 +0100

A sound project management methodology is at the heart of every successful implementation and Prophet always provides a first class service to its customers. Working together, we will determine the high-level objectives and success criteria. We will develop comprehensive project plans with realistic timelines, tasks and objectives, and work with you to guarantee the timeliness of all commitments.

The dedicated Project Manager will be your single point of contact within SunGard and will look after all of your needs. The Project Manager will also be responsible for communicating the project status and highlighting and mitigating risks that may affect deliverables and commitments.

Project Management Services datasheet

Prophet Enterprise Implementation

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:45:41 +0100

Prophet is a high performance enterprise-wide actuarial modelling system. It is engineered to assist Insurance and other Financial Services organizations in meeting their reporting responsibilities and improve their risk management with powerful processing capacities.

Ever-increasing demands on actuarial models means that there is an increasing demand for Information Technology resources to support the increased reporting complexities and to meet reporting targets.

Prophet uses best of breed technology in order to rapidly and efficiently execute models build in Prophet Professional. Through the use of grid computing clusters, Prophet Enterprise maximizes processing power, resulting in reduced costs and increased productivity. The automation of these tasks frees up staff and resources to focus on critical activities.

The Prophet Enterprise Implementation Service ensures that the application is deployed according to best practice principles and fits optimally into the existing customer IT infrastructure landscape.

Enterprise Implementation datasheet

Prophet Enterprise Readiness

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:44:19 +0100

Prophet Enterprise is a production-control framework designed to make your Prophet business process more effective by simplifying the activities of actuaries and the maintenance work for IT. It also provides greater control over the modelling process by separating the development and production environments, offering increased performance through scalability of its distributed processes.

The Prophet Enterprise Readiness Service is designed to ensure that you are ready for the move to Prophet Enterprise. We have outlined the areas and steps where our experience and expertise can help you implement the Prophet Enterprise solution in the simplest and most effective way. We want to ensure that you fully utilize the functionality most relevant to you and we will provide the project management, model testing, IT infrastructure, Prophet models reviews, deployment and test assistance services to help you achieve this.

With the impending introduction of the Solvency II legislation, the implementation of Prophet Enterprise provides SunGard customers with a robust actuarial production environment.

Enterprise Readiness datasheet

Building Prophet ALM Models

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:43:44 +0100

Using Prophet’s ALS library, the experienced Prophet team can help you implement your Market-Consistent Embedded Value model/s (MCEV) or upgrade your existing embedded value model(s) to take into account the latest MCEV or Solvency II principles. The ALS library is currently used to produce MCEVs and Economic Capital and allows you to quickly investigate different investment strategies and the effects of management decisions and profit sharing rules on future profitability. As well as supporting the liabilities, the ALS library supports all the main asset types and the release of the Advanced Asset Module will allow companies to model more complex assets. Using SunGard library and system expertise will ensure that you build optimal models that run efficiently.

Building Prophet ALM Models datasheet

Model Reviews

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:43:10 +0100

Ever-increasing demands on actuarial models such as Solvency II, Stochastic on Stochastic, Replicating Portfolios and increasing regulatory requirements mean our customers are always looking for ways to improve their end-to-end reporting process. This is an area that the Prophet team is uniquely placed to help.

Actuarial models evolve over time and not always in a consistent way. Cumulative additions to a model can often lead to less efficient code and code with poor consistency and readability. We have identified that many Prophet models do not use the most up-to-date and efficient system features that Prophet has to offer. This can translate to poor runtime performance and difficulties with upgrading. Thus, the product team conducts model reviews that allow you to benefit from our unique access to the latest system features, training and our wealth of Prophet experience.

Model Reviews datasheet

Implementing and Upgrading Prophet Liability Models

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:42:34 +0100

With increased regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, MCEV, Solvency II and IFRS and the demand to reduce the reporting timescales, companies of all sizes are looking to improve their end-to-end reporting processes. Many financial institutions are considering ways to aggregate and report on various risk activities seamlessly across their numerous business areas. Many are looking favourably at Risk Management systems operating across a common platform.

The Prophet Liability Model Implementation and Upgrade Service is designed to allow customers to estimate the effort involved in moving their actuarial models to the Prophet environment. It allows them to assess the costs of migration to this next generation – a way of working that offers better auditability, reduces reporting timescales and allows Actuaries to be more focused on monitoring and analysing those key risk indicators. They can then evaluate these costs against the savings gained through economies of scale of consolidated systems, reduced operational risk, better utilisation of hardware and reduced IT support costs.

Our team of dedicated Prophet library and IT consultants, supported by the resources of the whole Prophet team, can provide solutions from combined Actuarial and IT perspective, ensuring that when you start to use a new/upgraded library or module, they are best-placed to help you.

Model Implementation datasheet

Prophet Managed Hosted Services

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:41:58 +0100

iWorks Prophet Managed Hosted Services is a leading actuarial solution that delivers a comprehensive, fully integrated and securely managed hosted solution.

Delta Lloyd is one of the first iWorks customers to use the new managed hosting services capability. Norbert Hilhorst, Manager of Actuarial and Risk Management at Delta Lloyd, said, “Our year-end model run must complete in 30 days but it was taking 60 days with our previous installation. SunGard provided us with a capacity of 72 cores in the remotely accessed iWorks Prophet managed hosting services environment. Some of the stochastic model runs, which were previously completing in 9 hours, now finish in 40 minutes. We are pleased to say that the process went smoothly and in a time-frame we never anticipated possible.”

Distributed computing is fast becoming the new frontier in insurance and technology as insurers turn to a trusted partner with deep understanding of insurance to outsource critical IT processes. Increasing actuarial demands are also driving the need for more intensive and sophisticated calculations, resulting in a requirement for more computing power and scalability at an affordable price. In addition, regulatory demands require insurers to produce extensive period-end reporting that could take days to execute, requiring additional computing resources to supplement runs.

To address this need for ever-increasing computing power, SunGard iWorks offers Prophet Managed Hosted Services (PMHS): a hosted version of iWorks Prophet running on SunGard’s Infinity infrastructure. Infinity is an innovative strategy combining all of SunGard’s most valuable assets. It includes financial services expertise, technology solutions and collaborative services with service oriented architecture (SOA) to enable integration with other applications at an enterprise level. Infinity also provides business process management (BPM) to complement the overall strategy.

The Prophet Managed Hosted Service provides a centralised risk platform that may be accessed in a distributed fashion. Access to the system may be provided on-demand, so actuarial staff can come up to speed quickly. Capacity can be added easily as demand grows.

Prophet Managed Hosted Services give insurers the infrastructure and the capability to move their risk models into a managed service environment to provide: capacity and efficiency for more intensive stochastic modelling, greater transparency and an ‘enterprise view’ of their models to support a best practice approach to enterprise risk modelling.

As one of the leading providers of availability and disaster recovery services, SunGard understands the complexities in outsourcing critical parts of your business. Insurers can trust SunGard’s years of experience providing hosted services to the financial services industry through a worldwide network of state-of-the-art data centres.

Managed Hosted Services datasheet

Managed Hosted Services press release

Replicating Portfolio

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:38:56 +0100

Prophet Replicating Portfolio Module

Business needs and new regulations continuously increase the demands placed on actuarial modelling platforms. Typical reporting requirements require a vast array of sensitivities to be calculated. With more frequent valuations, there is a pressing need to reduce the timeframe for period-end reporting. Complex modelling techniques, such as those required to project the realistic balance sheet or economic capital, are adding to the calculation burden being placed on companies’ infrastructures.

The use of replicating portfolios to tackle these issues and as a risk management tool is becoming an increasingly popular alternative to the onerous calculations required for traditional methods. They provide an option to significantly speed up the calculations whilst retaining accuracy.

Prophet Replicating Portfolio Module Datasheet

Global Strategy US

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:38:10 +0100

Volatile financial markets and changes to solvency regulations are driving the need for robust enterprise risk management systems within insurance companies – at the heart of such systems are very sophisticated actuarial models.

In the US principle based approaches are already a reality with C3 Phase 2 and Actuarial Guideline 43. Soon, C3 Phase 3 and other initiatives will apply to all business.

With many reporting standards moving towards valuing insurance assets and liabilities on a market consistent basis it is becoming increasingly important to properly allow for asymmetries in insurance cash-flows (for example the effect of embedded options and guarantees). It is important that models allow fully for the dynamic decisions which management would take in future scenarios as well as modelling any likely policyholder reactions (dynamic lapses). Increasingly insurers are requiring full stochastic models which are able to model the complex interactions between economic scenarios, management actions and policyholder reactions within a fully dynamic projection of the assets, liabilities and company decisions.

The iWorks Prophet Global Strategy library is a flexible and extensive in fund modelling and dynamic linkage for asset and liabilities. When the library is used in conjunction with the Asset library it allows for a very powerful combination that allows detailed ALM models to be used and integrated into the internal risk management of a company.

Prophet Global Strategy Library (US) Datasheet

ALS

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:36:56 +0100

Prophet Asset and Liability Strategy Library (ALS)

With ever-changing markets and more regulatory demands on life insurance companies around the world, there is an increasing need for insurers to carry out Asset Liability Modelling (ALM) to investigate the relationships between their assets and their liabilities. The guarantees implicit in many life insurance products, the volatility in financial markets and lower levels of interest rates require that this modelling is carried out on a stochastic basis. New developments such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Market Consistent Embedded Values (MCEV) and Solvency II are some of the drivers for this. Other drivers are the desire on the part of many companies to carry out economic capital calculations, management of risk and to gain the many other benefits that a company can achieve from having a much better insight into their business.

The iWorks Prophet Asset Liability Strategy (ALS) Library enables customers to deliver on their stochastic ALM requirements and to help them achieve a more complete understanding of their company.

The ALS library is purpose built for market consistent ALM and is well placed for upcoming regulatory environments of Solvency II and PBA.

Prophet Asset & Liability Strategy Library datasheet

Security Module

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:36:04 +0100

The iWorks Prophet Enterprise Security Module offers a centralised results production environment for users across an organisation. Managing access and permissions ensures model integrity and reduces risk. The Security Module is designed to comply with your organisation’s strictest security standards. It allows you to manage and control activity and entity access at all levels. The advanced security features follow standardised data protection methods designed to safeguard critical data.

The Security framework supports:

Secure User Logon
Windows Authentication supported
Centralised and hierarchical security system
Object access, action and view controls
Role based security framework
Flexible user groups
Control over job priorities and calculation machine use
Demarcation of sets of users or purpose
Notification of multiple failed access attempts

Audit Module

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:35:06 +0100

The Prophet Enterprise Audit Module a centralised results production environment for users across an organization. Such a comprehensive view of data offers flexibility in enterprise-wide reporting; however the logging of activities and model run contents requires an external component in order to ensure the auditability of data. The Audit Module is designed to comply with your organisation’s strictest audit requirements and supports:

Reproducibility
Activity logs
Version Control
Data checksums
Full audit trail

Business Benefits

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:34:08 +0100

Business needs and new regulations continually increase the demands placed on an organisation’s risk management practice. There is increasing demand for the implementation of an enterprise risk management framework that addresses:

Need to improve efficiency and productivity

There is significant pressure to have greater automation in order to efficiently use actuarial and IT staff, particularly during critical times at period-end.

Increased regulation

Regulatory changes such as IFRS, C3 Phase III, PBA, ICA, EEV and Solvency II have increased the required volume of calculations and audit control requirements. The convergence of all regulatory requirements results in an increased demand for expert resources and a requirement to minimise turnaround time on needed reports.

Need for more sophisticated modelling

Stochastic modelling is a key component of the new reporting requirements resulting in an exponential increase in the volume of calculations necessary.

Prophet Enterprise Business Benefits datasheet

To view the Prophet Brochure, click here