Marie Benier, senior manager and Milliman Mind product owner, discusses the key features and actuarial modelling benefits that Milliman Mind offers re/insurers. She also explains plans for further innovation.
What actuarial modelling improvements can re/insurers that adopt Milliman Mind expect?
Milliman Mind is a game changer for actuarial modeling: it combines extreme agility and unlimited performance while ensuring top-notch security.
As a No Code solution, Milliman Mind simplifies model development by building C# models from Excel workbooks and turning them into professional looking and user-friendly web apps. Actuaries only need to implement their calculations in Excel, Milliman Mind handles the rest, significantly reducing the time and effort required to bring models to production and ensuring maintainability afterwards. Actuaries gain in productivity and agility for their modeling, and consequently, quality.
As a cloud-based and SaaS application, Milliman Mind requires no installation on local servers or workstations, enabling immediate access and seamless updates to benefit from new features right away: insurers no longer need to buy or maintain costly hardware, it is fully handled. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, Milliman Mind offers nearly limitless scalability which, combined with the power of C# language, enables insurers to reach new levels of speed.
Milliman Mind offers the high security of Microsoft Azure and the assurance of robust Milliman processes recognised by a SOC2 Type 2 certification. It also extends the security aspects to the end-users with governance-oriented features. With Milliman Mind, re/insurers can control and restrict model access with customisable rights management, as well as monitor and secure model distribution.
Can Milliman Mind help to make actuarial models more transparent and explainable for insurers' compliance teams?
Milliman Mind is a fully auditable solution offering complementary features to make actuarial models more transparent and explainable.
It features complete audit trails of changes and runs. Every change performed – whether it is on inputs, formulas, or configuration – is tracked, as well as every run performed and its status, with detailed information about who did what and when.
It includes optimised formula navigation. All formulas are accessible from the Milliman Mind interface and displayed as in Excel to ease the review process. Partial evaluation of formula, combined with a tree view of ascending and descending dependencies, drastically simplifies the audit of any result or intermediate calculations. There is seamless conversion back to Excel. Milliman Mind models can be exported back to Excel to serve as documentation / replication and offer an even more familiar option for audits.
Are there any plans to further innovate and improve Milliman Mind in 2025? What will this mean for insurers?
The Milliman Mind team is focused on constantly improving the solution. Among smaller features, three main improvements are planned to be released this year.
There has been a complete redesign of the project interface. After 7 years, it was time for a complete makeover of the main Milliman Mind interface. Based on the feedback from our users, unused features were removed, and design and navigation were improved for an even more intuitive experience.
By extending parallelization capabilities, the high performance computing feature will turn the constraint of runtime into a parameter. Servers will be configured to reach the acceptable runtimes defined by our users.
When dealing with big data, one of the key aspects of modelling software is to limit memory usage while ensuring quick access and visualisation of the data. It is a constant focus of Milliman Mind's development strategy, and additional improvements will be introduced to further extend the solution's capacities.
How should actuaries upskill in an increasingly technology and data-driven environment?
It is indeed key for actuaries to stay up to speed on the latest technology trends. In a world where artificial intelligence (AI) tends to be everywhere, they must explore and train themselves on the technologies that will help them become faster and more precise in their daily work. At Milliman, most of our R&D projects are AI-related and aim to light the path for our clients on the most promising use cases.
To thrive in this fast-changing environment, actuaries must, of course, master these new technologies but, more importantly, have a clear understanding of their limitations. They also have to avoid the pitfall of taking over the technical implementation of these new solutions: actuaries' added value lies in their ability to comprehend complex technologies and use them to produce more accurate results, not in the practical implementation of such solutions.
