Information Matrix

We talked previously about the use of user-defined validation rules to clean up specific data artefacts you sometimes find in portfolio data. One question came up recently about modelling bespoke benefit bands, and this can also benefit from user-defined rules.

Earlier Gavin wrote about a number of mobile devices from which you could run Longevitas software services, including a Nokia telephone and an iPod Touch.  This is not a result of specifically designing for these devices, but it is a handy benefit from following the open, published standards for web development.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that through time every portfolio will acquire data artefacts that make risk analysis trickier. Policyholder duplication is one example of this and archival of claims breaking the time-series is another.

We recently discussed the ways server-based modelling software facilitates collaboration across boundaries. Another important boundary is the office wall, although what was once considered an impermeable divide between work and the rest of our lives, is nowadays all-too porous.

Creating a good model from your experience data is not always straightforward.

Love them or loathe them, actuaries cannot get by without standard tables in some shape or form. Even when performing analysis of your own experience data to avoid basis risk, standard tables are often used as a kind of lingua franca between parties, a convenient way to express approximate results in a way everyone can understand.

If any doubt about Linux and Open Source technologies existed in Enterprise IT departments it must surely have been erased by last week's news: The London Stock Exchange, one of the engines that propelled the UK to the top of the World Economic Forum rankings, has invested in a Linux trading platform.

We were asked recently whether the rating reports from  mortalityrating.com could be extracted into a Microsoft Office format to use in an automated document production process. As the actual reports are in Adobe PDF format, tackling this question head-on wouldn't necessarily be easy.

A colleague of mine once described parallel processing as the "work of the devil". I don't know if I'd go quite this far — this statement was made in the early nineties, when technology was that little bit less advanced than it is today.

Not all security strategies need be as dramatic as those proposed by Mission Impossible, but anyone offering SaaS needs to ensure data is accessible by only authorised users.