hx Renew for actuaries: Faster, smarter insurance pricing
6 minutes
Discover how hx Renew enhances the actuarial workflow to create an optimized decision engine and drive business success.
Efficient workflows, rich live data and informed decision-making are key to creating and preserving your competitive advantage. Choosing the right pricing platform is vital.
Here are three ways hx Renew unlocks the potential of your actuarial teams.
1. Build and deploy new models 10x faster
Building out a global suite of pricing models with a connected database for exposure reporting is costly and time-consuming, often requiring months of specification time and development work.
hx Renew accelerates the realization of a fully integrated pricing landscape.
"We came up with a tight plan, aiming to go live with 20 models by the end of nine months. These are really difficult targets to hit. But any time an issue arose, the hyperexponential team helped us resolve it. The 20 models were completed as planned."
Shyam Bhayani, Head of Pricing, Global Corporate & Specialty at Aviva
Some of our customers, with small teams, have built out their entire suite of pricing models as part of a fully integrated workflow in less than a year.
How do we do it?
Build models with Python
hx Renew uses native Python, and training is provided as part of the package. Actuaries with no previous experience in the language are able to create their first models in a matter of days, then hours.
Learn more in our blog, Is Python the right programming language for insurance?
Modular approach
A modular framework reduces replicated effort, enables speedy model development and simplifies the build process. For businesses with many models, the ability to develop "best-practice" components for a specific purpose, then reuse them, helps to ensure consistent pricing logic.
Our best practice model templates are effectively out-of-the-box solutions with specialty insurance specific components, and you can customize them further using pre-built modules.
Automated databases
hx Renew automatically generates databases as you build models to enable exponential improvement as time goes on. Each model can be built faster, and each decision is informed by more and more data.
Capturing your pricing data unlocks a key strategic advantage when developing management information. Underwriters writing risks can refer to a comprehensive internal data set covering rate change across your portfolio, accumulations, benchmarks for performance in certain lines of business, and so on.
"No data put into hx Renew is lost. With Excel, everything gets trapped in a spreadsheet and is unusable in the long run. In hx Renew, we can aggregate all of our pricing data, for example, by line of business, and use that to create our development factors."
Stuart Quinlan, Deputy Chief Executive & Chief Operations Officer at Conduit Re
Deploy at speed
So you’ve built something effective, and you’ve built it quickly. The next step is rolling it out.
In hx Renew, actuaries own the deployment of models in a secure and resilient environment for a more agile workflow. Because the live and test environments for models are "side by side" in the platform, actuaries can deploy a model or model change to underwriters in just a couple of clicks.
No more sending around new versions of a spreadsheet, or relying on IT teams and external vendors!
2. Refine without friction
Changes in Excel may be quick, but without proper version control or infrastructure for testing and approvals, insurers often find themselves choosing between speed and proper data governance.
It’s no wonder 41% of pricing actuaries say making changes to applications and processes takes far too long.
What if that speed-governance dilemma didn’t exist? hx Renew’s web-based platform enables actuaries to make model changes at an Excel-like pace, while also offering automated batch testing, 'what-if' analysis, and automated regression testing to identify calculation errors.
This helps drive:
Seamless teamwork between underwriters and actuaries: Changes happen as and where they are needed, in a cost-effective way. This means actuarial teams can accommodate underwriters' needs with ease. hx Renew facilitates real-time communication for better collaboration.
Greater accuracy: Improving accuracy translates into substantial time savings, potentially up to one month per year, which would otherwise be spent rectifying inaccuracies in technical premiums generated by pricing models.
"With hx Renew the integrity of the model is automatically validated when changes are made. Any adjustment would traditionally take between 2-4 weeks; with hx Renew this is now less than a week."
George Murphy, Pricing Manager at Antares
3. Rich, live, continuous data for decision-making
hx Renew is a pricing decision intelligence platform. In real terms, this means actuaries contribute to, and benefit from, more informed decision-making enabled by a seamlessly integrated technology ecosystem.
This is reflected throughout the pricing workflow, including:
Seamless data ingestion
hx Renew integrates internal and external, structured and unstructured data.
API connections effortlessly ingest data from external sources, while unstructured data can be captured through web scraping. This enriched dataset serves as a valuable resource for informed decision-making and building future pricing strategies.
With relevant data pulled through automatically, actuaries can spend less time on tedious manual tasks and more time focused on value-added work.
Real-time rate change monitoring
With traditional solutions, pricing data is rarely readily available in a database for reporting and portfolio analysis. This makes it difficult to consistently monitor rate changes across the business.
47% of actuaries say their current technology is difficult to audit and report from.
Many insurers dedicate substantial time, up to three weeks per quarter, to manual data collection. Eliminating this burden can translate into annual savings up to and beyond $100,000.
However, the true value of transformation extends well beyond cost-cutting. With hx Renew, insurance professionals transition from reliance on outdated information to a dynamic environment of real-time rate change monitoring and decision-making. Automated dashboards show the live technical vs achieved price on both an individual and a portfolio level, enabling course correction and more effective risk selection.
Powerful analysis
hx Renew supports fully flexible scenario and impact analysis.
Being able to easily assess the marginal impact from model updates and assumption changes enables you to better understand the risks and opportunities in your portfolio, drive better decision-making and differentiate yourself from competitors.
"We're able to identify where the business isn't performing and where decisions are needed because we can get more data, more quickly. We spend less time cleaning it, less time on workarounds to patch it up. This means we can do the analysis, make decisions, and get back to underwriters faster."
Shyam Bhayani, Head of Pricing, Global Corporate & Specialty at Aviva
Your pricing transformation starts here
From building models to analyzing portfolio data, pricing with hx Renew is faster and more accurate. Just as importantly, the workflow is smoother and less manual—everyone knows how frustrating it is to grapple with technology that feels like it’s slowing you down, rather than enabling you.
hx Renew is the key to better outcomes, and a better experience for actuaries.
To learn about the impact of hx Renew first-hand, book a demo. Our experts can provide custom advice on pricing transformation for your organization.
