Information Matrix

The risk-transfer market for defined-benefit pensions in the UK has been  buoyant for many years.  There is considerable demand from pension schemes — to say nothing of their sponsoring employers — for solutions that transfer risks to insurers. 

Quantiles are points taken at regular intervals from the cumulative distribution function of a random variable. They are generally described as q-quantiles, where q specifies the number of intervals which are separated by q−1 points.

We have written in the past about some of the reasons why we don't use Excel to fit our models.  However, we do use Excel for validation purposes — fitting models using two entirely separate tools is a good way of checking production code.  That said, there are some important limits to Excel, especially when it comes to fitting projection models.

Actuaries are very heavy users of spreadsheets, especially Microsoft® Excel.  One question we are occasionally asked is why we wrote our software in C++, instead of letting people have direct access to our code as a spreadsheet.