Valuation Systems Transformation (VST) Qorus Innovation in Insurance Awards 2018 - Winner

The Valuation System Transformation (VST) Program at Manulife has completely transformed the Actuarial Valuation process, establishing an optimized, consistent and streamlined environment across the actuarial community. VST has implemented a centralized system and architecture that is fast, scalable, highly available and elastic utilizing MS Azure Cloud technology. The valuation process at Manulife is critical to both internal and external financial and regulatory reporting. Manulife’s valuation process worked, but with a high degree of complexity due to a legacy of historical mergers and acquisitions and rapid integration of the acquired businesses. There were significant changes in accounting and actuarial standards as well as an increased attention on risk management requiring additional market sensitivity analysis. Manulife’s decentralized approach to valuation resulted in inconsistent processes and key-person dependencies. With this history as a backdrop, additional challenges were coming up including: increasingly complex modeling to dampen the impact of volatile markets; additional changes to accounting and actuarial standard changes; and compliance with OSFI’s BCBS principles on risk data aggregation and risk reporting. These challenges drove the need for an enterprise data architecture solution and implementation. VST delivered on its vision of an optimized, consistent and streamlined valuation environment across the organization, providing a more reliable and robust core reporting, ensuring timely, value-added insights to support business management decisions. The program has simplified complex data management via a single cloud based ETL resulting in improved controls, and provided an enhanced governance framework to actuarial valuation systems as well as a data rich permanent database for improved and highly granular analysis to support both better valuation experience analysis and new product pricing/underwriting. As of March 31, 2018, North America implementations are complete, with Asia being completed by March 31, 2019.