Towers Watson, a global professional services company, launched a new software integration product designed to enable life insurers to run MoSes financial models in Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Services. With the introduction of MoSes Azure, insurers can now run their MoSes models distributed either in-house with MoSes HPC, in Windows Azure Cloud Services or in a seamless combination of both, according to Towers Watson. The company contends the ability to access extra computer power as needed will help insurers improve their financial modeling analytics for better management of risk and capital.
“For most life insurers, computing resource demands for financial modeling fluctuate greatly from typical daily use to heavy use at quarter- and year-end,” said Todd Erkis, global life software product manager, Towers Watson. “Insurers must decide on the appropriate level of investment for in-house computing resources. Should they invest in maximum capacity to handle peak demand, knowing they’ll have idle capacity during off-peak periods? Or should they invest to support typical demand, knowing they will suffer capacity constraints during peak demand? It’s a very difficult decision.”
MoSes Azure takes advantage of security features available in Windows Azure Cloud Services. “MoSes Azure provides a signature example of one of the ways that cloud computing can help insurers address their risk, regulatory and IT cost management needs,” said Tony Jacob, managing director, worldwide insurance, Microsoft Corp. “In this case, Microsoft provides an infrastructure as a service behind a leading actuarial modeling solution to provide the compute capacity needed to run more models more often and for greater resulting accuracy. This should be exciting for insurers that are looking at their quarterly and annual reporting needs, or are responding to the requirements of regulatory changes.”
Towers Watson recently also released updated versions of MoSes 6.6 financial modeling software designed to deliver the ability to manage report output definitions using output filter sets, and RiskAgility MoSes 3.2, an enterprise financial modeling platform for MoSes applications designed to give insurance companies the option to define additional validation criteria when enforcing model version control.
