Milliman's VEGA Solution
Ger Bradley, Head of the Non-Life Practice in Ireland, discusses Milliman’s VEGA solution, which helps to address the Solvency II directive. VEGA has numerous advantages, including that it’s ready to go and can be implemented very quickly. VEGA has a solid platform with easy-to-use workflow from start to finish. Developed by actuaries and IT professionals, VEGA has excellent functionality and tremendous flexibility.
Video transcript
Ger Bradley: The implementation day is the 1st of January 2016. The proprietary phase is there at the moment. People have to get stuff done over the next 18 months, and there’s a huge task ahead. VEGA is something we have built. It’s off the shelf. It’s ready to go. It has huge advantages for people at the moment. So, for example, it could be implemented very quickly. Compare that to some of the competition out there where you actually have to build it, and you have to write the programs yourself. You don’t have to do that here. So off the shelf is a big, big advantage. It’s easy to implement. It has been implemented by a group with about 11 subsidiaries in three months. IT projects don’t normally get delivered in three months, so to actually implement a major IT project in three months says just how flexible VEGA is. It’s a fantastic package. It was built by a combination of actuaries and IT professionals, so it’s a very solid platform. As a result of that combination, one of the great things it has is a great workflow. So as you make out a list of tasks that has to be done, you can do that every quarter. You set up the schedule, and it checks who’s done what by when. It can send you an email to remind you, and it reminds your manager of when you haven’t done it, etcetera.
Ger Bradley : So the workflow is fantastic just from start to finish. You can monitor everything. The audit controls in it are brilliant. So the alternative of having a spreadsheet where it’s impossible to control, VEGA has total auto control over it-- you know, everything that’s been changed, by who, and who has verified it, who has reviewed it, etcetera. It’s fantastic from an audit control perspective. From a management reporting perspective, it’s got all the standard QRT’s. There’s a hundred separate management reports in there already built. So we’ve said to everyone who’s buying this, although you can write your own reports in it, don’t. For the first six months, you got a hundred reports to kind of get to grips at first. That could give you everything you want. So get familiar with those reports, look at the hundred reports, and then if you still want to build your own reports, you can. It has the functionality. It has that flexibility.
Ger Bradley : You can export from a sheet. You can export, for example, straight into Excel so you can make up your own management reporting and get that into PowerPoint. You can get it into whatever you need for your board reporting or your managed reporting. It’s a tremendously flexible package that delivers loads of bespoke reporting, but at the same time has great control, is great for workflow, and is professionally written by a combination of actuaries and IT people. And it solves the problem people have now. The alternative to VEGA is to have a team of people manually gathering all this data on a regular basis every quarter, every year. The first time I actually had a team of people contact the standard format, I had two actuaries and an accountant spend three months at it. That just gives you a feel for the amount of manual work involved in this thing.
Ger Bradley: Replace that by basically VEGA and absolutely it is the industrialization of what would otherwise be a very expensive process.