Price smarter, not harder: 5 advantages of hx Renew for actuaries

In today’s world, being able to react quickly to the rapidly changing market while adhering to standards is a business imperative for insurers. Did you know that 80% of actuarial time is not spent on actuarial work? Below, we take you through five use cases of how hx Renew enables modern insurers to get the very best out of their team and transform the way they work and perform. 

1. Build 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. With hx Renew, tools can be developed in days/weeks and the great thing is, the more you build the faster you can release!

With hx Renew, actuaries are empowered to build their own pricing models on our dedicated SaaS platform using Python. Training is provided as part of the package, after which actuaries have the necessary skills to build their first models in a matter of days. Additionally, we have built best practice example models with specialty insurance specific components, effectively providing out-of- the-box models which you can customise using our pre-built modules.

We enable our users to take a modular approach to their build, so adding new models can be done in a matter of hours. We understand the requirements and complexity of the specialty market and the need to leverage modern pricing capabilities - and so our customers build these models in native Python allowing them to deploy the most recent pricing and data science and techniques like data driven triaging using machine learning, and image recognition deployed using artificial intelligence services.

The impact is huge - hx Renew accelerates the realisation of business value of having a fully integrated pricing landscape with rich MI for business steering, positively impacting underwriting profitability. 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. hx Renew users build their first models in days and quickly get to the stage where they are adding new models in a matter of hours. 

2. Deploy at speed, without dependencies on IT

Actuaries need to be able to deploy pricing tools to their underwriters in days not months – and they need to be able to do this without depending on external vendors or internal IT teams who may have painfully slow-release processes, sometimes only actioning updates every 3-6 months.

Compared to traditional pricing tools, hx Renew is 10x faster to deploy a new model. With our self-service platform, actuaries deploy models themselves – with no input required from IT, enabling them to have a Continuous Deployment Process (CDP).

Leveraging the hx Renew automated release process, models can be deployed in just two clicks, empowering actuaries to work collaboratively with underwriters. Gone are the days of large IT transformation projects to get your model live. With hx Renew, actuaries create new model 10x faster than with traditional tools and can release these with two clicks.

3. Refine without friction

Making changes to models shouldn’t be painful. With Excel the initial change may be quick (but may not!), yet with no version control or governance around testing and approvals, insurers quickly find themselves having to choose between speed and data credibility and governance. With internal IT or external vendor systems, add to this the time to state the functional and non-functional requirements, agree commercials, allocate support time or adhere to internal release cycles, internal testing – the list goes on and on.

To better enable their underwriting teams, actuaries need to be able to make changes fast, to do it themselves at no cost and at a time that suits them, with version control and rigorous testing. Collaboration between actuaries and underwriters is key.

In hx Renew, actuaries can do all this thanks to our agile, web-based SaaS platform. Actuaries make changes to models at excel-like speed and can run automated batch-testing and ‘what-if’ analysis, plus automated regression testing which checks for calculation errors.

This can save up to one month per year that would otherwise be spent correcting incorrect technical premiums being produced by pricing models. Algorithm and rate changes can be made in days, not weeks, and customers achieve full compliance to standards with no IT and vendor costs.

With hx Renew, algorithm, UI and rate changes can be made in minutes or days, not weeks or months.

4. Real-time rate change monitoring

With traditional solutions, Chief Actuaries and Heads of Pricing (as well as underwriters, CUO and executives) are unable to consistently monitor rate change across the business due to pricing data not being readily available in a database for reporting and portfolio analysis.

Many insurers are spending as much as three weeks per quarter on manual data collection, removing this burden can amount to 100k in savings per year, but more importantly enable real time monitoring and steering, rather than relying on out-of-date information which is months old.

hx Renew reclaims the savings as it provides real-time rate change monitoring through automated dashboards which show technical vs achieved price in real time, on an incident as well as portfolio level. Databases are created and automatically updated thanks to API integrations with MI tooling – enabling course correction but also more effective risk selection.

hx Renew can typically save 100k per year by replacing manual data collection and analysis with automated dashboards and enabling real-time rate change monitoring.

5. Data-driven decision making

Reporting on pricing data for use by actuaries, underwriters and executives is usually a highly manual process and often difficult, if not impossible, to provide consistently across all lines of business.

With hx Renew, the database is automatically generated as you build the model and available in real time through our APIs. This means that portfolio level data is instantly accessible from the platform, ready to be summarised and analysed to drive business steering and decisions. What is more, this data can also be made available to underwriters at the point of pricing to enable more data driven decisions.

Enriching pricing data is a key to future profitability and competitiveness. Third party data can be collected automatically without the need for rekeying via APIs. hx Renew makes data ingestion easy through API connections to data sources such as companies house, yahoo finance, and many more, as well as enabling the capture of unstructured data through web scraping, enriching the data available for future pricing.

With hx Renew you gain instant accessibility to portfolio data and are able to fully utilise third-party data. This enables you to make better, data-driven decisions.

Get in touch to find out what you could make possible with hx Renew.