How Óptima Mayores turned Excel into the infrastructure behind every customer interaction
At a glance
Óptima Mayores is an independent actuarial consultancy and advisory firm based in Madrid, specialising in helping clients unlock liquidity from their property assets. Their team guides clients through the various equity release plans available, from lifetime mortgages to annuity products, with advice tailored to individual circumstances. The business logic behind those products lives in Excel. It powers client-facing calculations on their website, partner integrations, and internal workflows. With fewer than twenty people on staff and a two-person IT team responsible for all of it, the margin for technical overhead is zero.
For two years, Óptima Mayores ran their models on a platform that demanded more from their team than it gave back. They switched to Coherent. What followed was four days to full production, a platform their CTO doesn't need to log into, and for the first time, visibility into how every partner and channel is actually using their models.
Key results
4 days from production environment to full go-live across all channels
50% reduction in model platform costs
6,000+ production API calls in the first 7 weeks
5 minutes for partner-level API usage reporting
The Challenge
A platform that created more work than it solved
Óptima Mayores' previous platform for logic externalization had taken roughly three months to set up, including reworking models to fit the platform's requirements. When calculations didn't return expected outputs after that adaptation process, the IT team had to go back and forth with the vendor's developer team to troubleshoot. For two people also managing the CRM, choosing the hardware, and handling every other technical decision at the company, every hour spent troubleshooting the model platform was an hour not spent on the twenty other things a two-person IT team owns.
The gap was sharpest around reporting. When leadership asked how a specific partner integration was performing, the answer required downloading raw API call data, building an Excel workbook, filtering and structuring it manually, then assembling a presentable report. A straightforward question became a full day's work. And because the platform offered no way to segment API usage by source, tracking which partners or websites were generating calls meant rebuilding that picture from scratch every time.
"For us, Coherent is now the brain and the heart of Óptima. Our website, our partner program — it's all based on that. It gave us visibility we never had before, it responds faster than what we had, and it's made our lives easier."
- Alejandro Villa López, CTO, Óptima Mayores
Our Solution
Tag it, upload it, expose it
After an initial demo, Coherent provided a trial sandbox environment. The team evaluated it hands-on and made their decision within a week. Once the production environment was provisioned, the team had four models live within four days.
Óptima's definition of "live" wasn't limited to internal use. Their models serve calculations directly to their website, where customers run projections. They power partner portals through API integrations. They support internal workflows. All of it was running within days, and nobody outside the two-person IT team noticed a transition had happened.
Where the previous platform had required months of adapting models and resolving calculation discrepancies with the vendor's developers, the process on Coherent was fundamentally simpler: tag the inputs and outputs in your spreadsheet and upload to Spark. Once a model is uploaded, it's callable as an API across any channel — the same model that serves a partner portal can serve the website and the internal CRM, with versioning and usage tracking across all of them.
Our Impact
Less overhead, more operating capacity
Óptima Mayores didn't swap one vendor for another. They moved from a platform that created work to one that runs their business logic as production infrastructure, without demanding ongoing attention from their team.
Full production in four days, including external channels
The team deployed four models across their website, partner portals, and internal systems within four days of receiving their production environment. On their previous platform, the equivalent setup had taken three months. Within seven weeks on Coherent, those models had processed over 6,000 production API calls.
Reporting dropped from a full day to five minutes
When leadership asks how a partner integration is performing, the answer takes five minutes instead of a full working day. The team can now filter API usage by partner, model, and date range directly in the platform.
Source-level API visibility that didn't exist before
Óptima now assigns dedicated API keys to each integration source, whether that's a partner, the company website, or an internal CRM. For the first time, the team can see exactly which channel is generating calls, at what volume, and over what time period.
Operational overhead approaching zero
The platform doesn't require routine attention. No monitoring burden, no troubleshooting cycles, no ongoing maintenance. For a CTO managing an entire company's technology stack with one colleague, that frees up capacity for everything else the role demands.
50% reduction in model platform costs
The switch cut Óptima's model platform spend in half. The savings confirmed a decision the team had already made for operational reasons.
What's Next
From four models to new business lines
Coherent has become what Alejandro Villa López, CTO, describes as "the brain and the heart" of Óptima Mayores. The company's website, partner program, and internal workflows all run on the models deployed through the platform. That foundation is now stable enough to build on.
The team is evaluating new business lines, including insurance products outside their current focus on equity release and lifetime mortgages, with Coherent as the platform those new models will run on. Alejandro noted that seeing the platform's developer tools and code snippets, including connections to AI services, put possibilities on the table the team hadn't considered before.
For a company that had the ambition but not the infrastructure, having their spreadsheet logic governed, callable, and running in production is what turns ideas into a roadmap.
Excel infrastructure your business can grow on
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