A key theme in our consulting work has been that the MyActuary consultants go beyond their actuarial skills to make life easier for in house resources.

The primary users of our services (and users can be from most any area of the company) like us because we don't require stacks of documentation to define a project. Our business knowledge allows us to work on their terms.

Life is easier for the in house actuaries, accountants, lawyers, etc., because we know when something needs to be brought to their attention. They don't need to assign valuable resources to oversee projects that aren't their primary responsibility.

In house IT resources like us because we know how to make their jobs easier with things like good specifications, flexibility, and followup support.

Finally, we always strive to reduce costs, streamline procedures, and make it easy to bring processes that we develop in house. We want to be indispensable by solving new problems, not by controlling the solution to old ones.

Here's a summary of a few of our more interesting projects:

Innovative Product Development - No cookie cutter product development here. We have developed custom life and annuity products for clients that include several client owned patent pending designs. Talk to us about longevity insurance.

Variable Annuity Performance Reporting - See our website at www.VariablePerformanceReports.com for details on our products and services dedicated to streamlining variable performance reports and providing innovative sales tools.

Administrative System Conversions and Problem Solving - We have provided actuarial support, data scrubbing, and audit support for life and annuity system conversions. We specialize in solving sticky administrative problems that involve remediation of products on inadequate legacy systems.

IRC Section 7702/7702A Tax Calculations -  We built a custom desktop system for administering IRC 7702, 7702A testing and reporting for a particularly complex block of policies that were recently converted. The block was not large enough to justify the significant cost of modifying the admin system. Our custom system had to receive regular data feeds from the admin system, calculate tax premiums, reflecting any post-issue changes, test against premiums paid, and identify violations in reports that customer service could use to process policyholder correspondence and refunds. We also kept costs down by building upon existing programs and spreadsheets. When the system was completed, we provided actuarial support during a violation audit and IRS remediation project to identify and correct policy violations that had slipped through the cracks during the conversion.

Dividend Scale Changes - The client had a large closed block of participating business that had not been revised in several years. What made this project interesting is that the block had been analyzed by a large consulting firm a few years before, but no changes were ever implemented. It turned out that the bigger problem was not getting an actuarial study done, but getting actual new scales implemented. We built a three-factor dividend calculator that would generate a full set of dividend scales and would allow for future changes to be made quickly. Then, working closely with their in house IT people, we built custom data feeds formatted to upload to their admin system with a minimum of manual handling. In the past, dividend changes were added manually! We then worked with the quality control people to provide tools to more easily test the system.

Custom Valuation System - We streamlined an existing in house custom desktop valuation system for a complex block of policies and reduced the monthly valuation reporting cycle on this block from two weeks to six hours.

Direct Marketing Projections - Developed a customized multi-line direct marketing sales projection financial model.