Legacy review and systems migration support
Our client is a leading life assurance company in Ireland, with a strong track record and commitment to achieving service excellence and providing outstanding customer care.
Background
The client was looking for additional expertise to help their existing in-house actuarial teams in two main project areas:
- To provide support in managing a peak of actuarial calculation work, and in particular to address two legacy issues surrounding annual benefit statements and retirement funds.
- To assist the actuarial services team in the migration of the firm’s existing business quotation system to a new online platform.
Project Aims
The broad aims of the legacy projects were to:
- Ensure that the client complied with a recent change in regulation introduced by the Central Bank of Ireland regarding the disclosure of information in annual benefit statements, sampling and cross referencing recorded statements against the new requirements.
- Rectifying some historic manual input errors regarding the allocation of retirement funds, including recreation of policies where necessary.
The migration project involved the product specification, development and testing of the new platform to manage a wide range of products including protection policies, pensions and retirement bonds, endowments, and regular and single premium savings products.
APR's Role
APR supplied two of its actuarial associates, John Nicholls and Richard Collins to provide support on the legacy and migration projects respectively.
Legacy projects
After an initial period assisting with the management of the calculations and disclosures peak, John’s focus shifted onto the two legacy projects. His main tasks involved:
- Establishing parameters for sampling the annual benefits statements to ensure that all of the required product groups were covered, the correct number of policies were checked and processed for each product group, and sampling dates correctly distributed.
- Manually checking samples of policies without electronically issued statements, to ensure that they correctly matched regulatory specifications.
- Designing a spreadsheet to recreate retirement policies as currently held on the client’s platform, and building additional functionality to automate the comparison between the current and correct positions so that remediation could be applied.
System migration
Richard worked within a small team managing the migration of business onto the new platform. Tasks included:
- Creating a suite of spreadsheets to model calculations involved in producing illustrations across a wide range of unit linked products – these were then used by the system developers in coding the online quotation engine.
- Testing the output of the new system against the results produced by these spreadsheets, documenting any discrepancies.
- Assisting the team more widely in production of policy recreations and manual disclosures following alterations to unit linked life assurance products.
Outcome
Both legacy projects were completed within required timescales. Although John’s involvement was as part of a much larger team effort, his strong Excel ability meant that some of the spreadsheets he built have created significant time savings across other remediation projects.
Richard’s work on the migration project also contributed to a successful outcome. In addition to building models for the products that were his main focus while based in Dublin, he was able to extend this work to another suite of products after his initial end-date, working on these models remotely in APR’s offices.