Zenith Actuarial and “evo-insight”: The platform that turns workbooks into calculation APIs
Zenith Actuarial is an innovative and agile consulting firm specialising in actuarial and technology services for the insurance and financial services sectors. Leveraging its extensive experience and adaptability, Zenith navigates the complexities of these industries, delivering bespoke solutions tailored to each client’s unique circumstances and objectives.
For Zenith, technology plays a critical role in serving its clients, as much of the advice is based on models that need to scale, be well governed, and offer robust controls. Many of these models start life as client spreadsheet models or Python scripts, often referred to as “end-user computing” (EUC).
While EUCs are excellent starting points for prototyping and rapid analytics development, they present challenges in terms of scalability and governance.
To address these challenges, Zenith Actuarial partnered with Plain Concepts to develop evo-insight, an award-winning platform. evo-insight transforms workbooks into computing APIs hosted on Azure, integrating them into highly scalable, well-governed, and strictly controlled web applications running on Azure.
The Zenith Revolution Process
To implement the project and overcome the aforementioned challenges, we followed a five-step process:
1. Creation of initial Proofs of Concept (PoCs) to evaluate architecture performance, parallelization capabilities, cold boot times, and overall simplicity.
2. Kubernetes was discarded due to its operational complexity and the high level of technical expertise required.
3. The first PoC with Azure Container Apps completed the computing process, but configuration limitations in KEDA prevented the desired parallelization.
4. A second PoC with Azure Batch was tested, resulting in a significant leap in performance, meeting scalability and efficiency expectations.
5. Azure Datalake was integrated to store and handle the large output generated by the parallel execution of analytics.
Plain Concepts brought deep technical expertise in Azure cloud services to design and refine an architecture that fully met Zenith’s requirements. Continued collaboration is planned for the next phases of Zenith’s roadmap, which includes developing a richer set of extract-transform-load capabilities and supporting a broader set of EUC analytics.
Results
- Performance optimisation with a simple and efficient infrastructure.
- Scalable architecture to expand Zenith’s market offering.
- Reduced computing time from 24 hours to 20 minutes..
- Achieved a 50% reduction in computational operating costs.
- Platform customers can now produce their regulated economic scenarios in 30 minutes instead of 6 hours
- Running thousands of simulations much faster, allowing rapid model adjustments as new information emerges.
We are ready for new challenges.
