IT skills for ActuariesSPEDICATO, GIORGIO ALFREDO PH.D C.STAT FCAS FSA

Summary

General Skills OS, Office Data base and programming Statistical Software: IT

Focus R for life insurance R for health predictive modeling

General Skills: OS & OFFICE

Most actuaries work with Windows PC in a LAN environment. Linux used only on servers. (Shared folders…)

Working knowledge of Word, Excel and Outlook is assumed. MS Access knowledge a plus.

Power point skills (presentations) will rapidly be acquired.

Programming

Most actuaries will write programs in their work. Structured programming mostly (conditional structures). Depending by specialization, they may face object oriented

programming .

Programming

All actuaries will eventually write VBA code. Also, keeping in touch with SQL will be very easy. General knowledge on data base structure, data retrieving and

manipulation logic is extremely useful.

General Skills: retrieving and summarizing data

Most actuarial problems require data gathering, data tidying and summarization.

Risk and statistical modeling cover just 10% of work time. Valuable it skills are those that help the actuary to:

Overview and assess data. Clean that data. Summarize data (Excel pivot table, filters, etc…)

Statistical and Actuarial Software

Two groups: general purpose statistical software / actuarial software. Two groups : open source / paid ones. Two groups: click and submit / programming skills requiring.

Statistical Software

SAS is the major software used in corporate analytics. Excellent data management facility. Wide set of statistical functions.

De facto data – management Lingua Franca. Easily known. Corporate competitors (SPSS, Stata) have limited market share in Europe.

Requires huge IT investments. Not taught in Academics.

R, Python

R (and Python following) are gaining more and more acceptance in corporate.

R advantages: Taught in Academics. De facto, statistics lingua franca. Wide open – source community that provides plenty of packages for all

functions R disadvantages:

Yet seen with suspect by it guys (lack of corporate support) Steep learning curve

Professional Softwares

Willis Tower Watson (after EMB acquisition) is the world actuarial software provider. Non – life solutions: Emblem, Rate Assessor, Classifier (predictive modeling); Igloo

(capital modeling; ResQ (reserving) Life solutions: MoSes, Star ESG (life insurance modeling) https://www.towerswatson.com/en/Services/our-solutions/risk-software-solutions

CAT Modeling: EQUECAT, RMS, AIR for Catastrophe Modeling ArcGis for handling spatial data

Other software: Bloomberg, Sofia

Examples

Using R for Life Insurance Using R for Health Insurance

Questions?