Transforming actuarial modeling into governed, same-day pricing decisions

A leading multinational life insurer and asset manager offering group benefits, retirement, and wealth solutions to millions of customers worldwide. Known for disciplined governance and practical innovation, the company continuously looks for ways to improve speed and reliability in actuarial and pricing operations.

Like many global insurers, the actuarial modeling environment relied heavily on Excel and VBA for cash-flow projections, profit-testing, and scenario analysis. As capital requirements and model complexity increased, the process struggled to keep up. Pricing teams needed cloud-scale execution and stronger governance — without giving up Excel.

Where the friction lived:

• Runtime limitations: Looping scenarios through VBA was possible but slow — often 8.5 hours for 1,000 scenarios. Same-day iteration wasn’t feasible, and 10,000-scenario tests were out of reach.
• Manual processes: Each update to rating or assumption logic required re-coding, documentation, and coordination across teams. Version control was inconsistent, and testing cycles were repetitive.
• Governance pressure: New regulatory and capital requirements demanded transparent audit trails and standardized assumption management, which the existing spreadsheet workflow couldn’t easily support.

The insurer wanted a modernization path that balanced agility with control — keeping Excel at the center while adding the scale and structure their teams needed.

Coherent enabled the insurer to keep modeling in Excel while running those models as governed cloud services though Coherent Spark. This delivered the speed and control that traditional spreadsheets alone couldn’t provide, and without disrupting existing workflows.

How it works:

Actuarial teams upload their existing Excel pricing models to Coherent Spark and execute large scenario sets in the cloud. Spark replaces VBA logic with Excel LAMBDA and adds versioning, assumption tracking, and standardized templates for consistent documentation and auditability.

What it enables:

• Same-day iteration: Parallelization and batch orchestration cut runtimes from hours to minutes, enabling faster “what-if” testing.
• Governance by design: Built-in versioning, assumption tracking, and a single-source model pattern reduce copy risk and improve auditability.
• Built-in transparency: Coherent Spark provides visibility into calculation times and the cost of each run, giving actuaries and leaders confidence in performance and efficiency.
• Consistent reviews: Standardized templates make stochastic result assessment faster and more reliable, improving consistency across teams.
• Actuary-first workflow: Excel remains the modeling language, while Coherent Spark provides elastic compute, orchestration (parallel/batch), data integration, and connectivity to Python and workflow tools.
• Seamless with existing systems: Coherent Spark runs alongside legacy actuarial systems (Prophet, AXIS, ALFA, Risk Agility), adding scale without forcing a rip-and-replace migration.

With Spark in place, pricing teams can now iterate models and deliver pricing updates in a single day — while maintaining strong governance.

The insurer is expanding Spark’s API integration to connect actuarial logic directly with downstream tools such as illustration systems and rating engines, shortening the path from model to product launch.

The modernization program also includes using Spark to support faster experimentation and configurable products — all without changing how actuaries work day-to-day.