Aon's PathWise platform becomes 'all-in-one' financial risk management system for Kyobo Life

Aon plc (NYSE: AON), a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions, today announces that Kyobo Life has successfully implemented its PathWise high performance computing platform in preparation for the IFRS 17 and K-ICS financial reporting regimes.

The South Korean life insurance company firm embedded PathWise as its all-in-one financial risk management platform to fulfil a range of tasks, including assumption management, economic scenario generation (ESG), asset-liability management (ALM), hedging, and K-IFRS, IFRS 17, and K-ICS reporting – which require a variety of scenarios and shock-based computations that demand hundreds of millions of paths of calculations.

In contrast to legacy actuarial systems, PathWise utilizes the parallel processing power of graphical processing units (GPUs), which contain thousands of processing cores each to simultaneously produce huge volumes of scenarios and handle policy-by-policy basis calculations without using approximations or shortcuts such as scenario reduction, curve fitting, and policy grouping.

Conversely, legacy actuarial software platforms are often based on central processing units and use sequential computations, making them far less able in terms of speed and efficiency.

In approximately five hours, PathWise is able to calculate Kyobo's IFRS 17 best estimated liability and risk adjustment for 40 million policies on a policy-by-policy basis using 60 GPUs. The entire financial statement generation process, including the financial statement movement analysis, can be completed in just 36 hours.

Meanwhile, PathWise can calculate the required capital amount for Kyobo's K-ICS QIS 2.0 within 30 hours, with no significant impact on the calculation run-time even when the number of scenarios increased from 200 to 1,000.

Kyobo Life's actuarial infrastructure team leader, Kim Yeon Jung, said: "Accurately analyzing financial effects and establishing strategies under the new regulations requires a lot of computations, and so we needed high-performance computing software for such difficult workloads. In addition, change management and system control functions for complex models and large amounts of data are necessary too. PathWise's high performance ensured the necessary speed for computations, along with flexibility and stability for ease of management under new regulations such as IFRS 17 and K-ICS."

Peter Phillips, President and CEO of PathWise Solutions Group, said: "Being able to perform complex calculations at such speeds offers PathWise clients clear efficiency gains, which can translate into real cost savings for their businesses. As more companies realize they need to carefully consider their approaches to regimes such as IFRS 17 and K-ICS, and also want the benefit of a single platform for their financial reporting, PathWise can step-in and help them to overcome their challenges."