The financial services sector frequently utilises complex, stochastic spreadsheet models, which can contain months or years of valuable development work and IP. Often, these spreadsheets need to access externally generated scenario files or use Excel’s random distribution generators within the spreadsheet model itself.

In either event, there will inevitably be a VBA macro to iterate across the scenarios to change the inputs and store the outputs for subsequent aggregation, analysis, and reporting. In such situations, spreadsheets often have inherent performance and operational risk challenges, with excessive run-times for multiple iterations on a single machine and lack of security, versioning, and access control.

evo-insight  addresses the performance limitations by embedding the workbook and VBA macro   within a cloud hosted business application, enabling the calculations to be automatically distributed across on-demand, auto-scaling compute, and storage infrastructure. The result is that thousands of scenarios can take the same time to run as a single iteration.

The  evo-insight  business application also places governance and version controls around the spreadsheet model. It provides insightful analytics to visualise and report on the model outputs to “rapidly bring governed analytics into the hands of users” without any need to rewrite the tested model.

From a practical perspective  evo-insight’s  embedding process is simple and quick, so future updates to the underlying spreadsheet models can easily be uploaded and the version history tracked. Importantly the application can be connected via a standard API, to other enterprise systems such as core administration and quotation systems, to enable end to end processes to be modelled and executed in a fully secure and scalable environment.

For more information including a demonstration please contact Dan (dan.wainwright@zenithactuarial.com) or Martin (martin.sher@zenithactuarial.com)

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