Gavin Ritchie
IT Director
Gavin spent his previous career in software development and database design in a variety of employed and independent roles. Development activities for Life Insurance systems proved a launching pad to a collaboration with Stephen Richards, and the Longevitas application suite was born. Alongside steering the IT function, Gavin is the primary developer for database, Java and web-related technologies.
Articles written by Gavin Ritchie
Rewriting the rulebook
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.
Upwardly mobile
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.
A problem shared
Creating a good model from your experience data is not always straightforward.
Personal standards
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.
Open verdict
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.
Beginner's guide to postcode pricing
We've created a short graphical summary of the application of postcode-driven lifestyle within actuarial mortality models.
Postcode pricing in 15 minutes!
Just a short post to announce we've revised our overview videos for both Longevitas and mortalityrating.com.
Transforming the user experience
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.
Concentrate!
One of the challenges in modelling financial portfolios is the concentration of risk arising from the fact wealthier people will usually have significantly higher benefits than the less well-off.
Confounding compounding
Earlier posts discussed the importance of deduplication in annuity portfolios and pension schemes and some of the issues around the deduplication of names, specifically the use of double metaphone to look through common variant spellings of the surname or family name.