Insurance is an economic sector with an inverted production cycle. The insurer sets the premium for its product in advance, before observing the actual amounts of claims and related expenses afterwards. Hence the strategic importance, for the long-term survival of the insurance company, of an adequate valuation of technical provisions and of the risk related to their run-off.

In addition to the amounts of future claim payments, technical provisions must include a margin reflecting the risk inherent in the run-off of these claims. Appropriate modelling makes it possible to determine these "Best Estimate" reserves.

The real difficulty lies in identifying the models suited to your portfolio and your claims data. Indeed, once the models have been selected, "Best Estimate" technical provisions can be calculated with simple statistical software, or even a good office tool such as a spreadsheet.

Optimising the stochastic reserve valuation models is the core of any reserving exercise. It requires statistical software such as SAS, R or SPSS, and at least one actuary or statistician specialised in modelling who also has a thorough command of IT and statistical programming. But this solution represents too large and risky an investment for an insurance company. That is why we offer you Reser-Best, our non-life reserving software, together with appropriate training in its use.

Introducing Reser-Best

Reser-Best is a software package for optimising reserving models. Entirely programmed in .NET, it works together with a spreadsheet. In a first step, this makes it easy for the software to access your data, whatever your database management system; in a final step, the results are produced in a spreadsheet, so that they can easily be fed back into your information systems. Between these two steps, the software scans thousands of stochastic models and proposes those best suited to your claims data. It also adjusts your claims triangles and fills in missing values based on a whole set of statistical tests. This software is a genuine technical achievement: on the one hand, it covers all the state-of-the-art statistical methods in the field of reserving, programmed from A to Z; on the other hand, its high-level algorithms make the most of the computer's power to propose the models that best fit your data structures. These optimal models value your Best Estimate reserves. The software also produces a technical reserve report containing all the statistical tests used throughout the optimisation process.