How to Automate Moody's Analytics AXIS

A reserve leaves the building with somebody's signature on it

Every reserve a life insurer books has to be modelled somewhere, and for a great many of them that somewhere is AXIS: the actuarial system insurers, reinsurers and consulting actuaries run their liabilities on. Moody's bought it with GGY in 2016 and now sells it under the Moody's name, so older material and plenty of actuaries still say GGY AXIS.

What comes out of it is not a report. It is the figure a company reports to a regulator and books in its accounts: the reserve, the required capital, the value of a block of business. Pricing a new annuity happens in it, and so does the quarterly valuation, the asset and liability work, the cash flow testing, the stress runs behind an ORSA, and reporting under IFRS 17 or the US GAAP long duration rules.

That sets an unusual standard for a piece of software. A spreadsheet that is wrong gets corrected quietly. A reserve that is wrong gets restated, in public, with a name attached.

Quarter end is a queue of runs and a list of people to chase

Nothing in a quarter close is delayed by a shortage of actuarial skill.

The quarter goes on waiting. The valuation extract from the administration system is late again, and the version that did arrive is missing the riders. The reinsurer has not sent the cession data. An assumption change agreed in a meeting six weeks ago is still unsigned by the one person who can sign it. A run started at seven in the evening either finished or fell over at half past two, and which of those it was stays unknown until somebody opens a laptop.

Then the parts that are not modeling at all. A rate filing sitting in a state's system waiting on a status only a reviewer can change. A peer reviewer who has had the workbook since last Tuesday. A client deliverable a consulting team promised for Friday. The record of who owes what lives in a spreadsheet, updated when somebody remembers.

None of that needs a credential. All of it needs somebody to go and look.

Moody's Analytics AXIS

Overnight runs reported by morning What finished, what failed and what is still going, on a page before the team logs on, instead of found at nine by whoever opens the laptop first.

The people who owe you something, listed Assumption sign-offs outstanding, peer reviews untouched, the cession file that stopped a month short of where it should have.

The opinion stays with the actuary Status is gathered and drafts are prepared. Nothing is submitted, signed or sent to a client without the person whose name goes on it.

DataLink prepares the data somebody already delivered

There is a great deal of automation inside AXIS already, and none of it is decorative.

DataLink imports and transforms the business data to be modeled and prepares assumptions for use, which takes the worst of the hand-work out of readying a valuation. Enterprise GridLink puts serious compute behind a run, so a seriatim valuation across a whole block becomes a scheduling question. AXIS Cloud runs the system as a managed service, with data preparation, compute and reporting connected rather than handed between environments. AXIS Navigator answers questions about the system in plain language with citations back to the documentation, which matters when the person who knew the answer has moved firms.

Each of those makes the model better fed and faster to run. That is exactly what they are built for.

What sits outside them is the rest of the cycle. The administration team that owes you an extract. The reinsurer's extranet. The state's filing system. The reviewer who has not signed. The client promised Friday. Every one of those is somebody else's system, holding a status the actuarial calendar depends on.

A valuation cycle can flag its own missing pieces

Runs and filings both have a status, and a status is a thing that can be read on a schedule.

A batch that finished at two in the morning reported before anyone logs on, with failures named and the runs still going flagged by how long they have been going. Valuation data checked as it lands rather than three days later: the extract that came without riders, the cession file that stops a month short, the policy count that moved further than a quarter should move it.

Then the chasing nobody enjoys. Assumption sign-offs still outstanding, listed with who owes each one and how long it has been sitting. Peer reviews untouched since they were handed over. A rate filing followed on the state's own system until the status genuinely changes, so the first to know is not the person who asked. Statutory dates counted down instead of remembered.

None of that is actuarial judgement. It is the logistics wrapped around actuarial judgement, and it is what turns a quarter close into a rescue.

Judgement is what the signing actuary is paid for

A run that finishes at two in the morning tells nobody. Someone opens a laptop at seven, works out what fell over, and restarts the chasing from a spreadsheet of who owes what.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens AXIS, the administration system, the reinsurer's site and the state's filing system, reads how far each has got, and hands back one page: what ran, what broke, what is late, who has not signed.

The gathering runs unattended, because reading a status changes nothing. Anything that alters an assumption, submits a filing or reaches a client waits for the actuary who will put their name to it, and a run can be watched live and stopped.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.