Annuity Solutions Group

Aon Benfield Analytics

The Annuity Solutions Group (ASG) provides clients with hedge program advisory services and innovative risk management consulting and solutions. By managing and implementing effective hedge programs, and deploying integrated software solutions, the ASG helps businesses meet and exceed their goals. 

The ASG team is a pioneer in hedging variable annuity risk, and has hands-on experience managing the largest variable annuity hedging programs in the world. The team has managed programs in three different countries across three different time zones, and has more than 40 years of derivatives risk management and trading experience. 

PathWise Capabilities and Key Features

PathWise™ is a variable annuity risk management business solution supporting new product development, financial and regulatory reporting, enterprise risk management activities, and hedge program management and reporting. The PathWise platform is an integrated high performance computing solution based on advanced parallel computing technologies, such as NVIDIA Tesla GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) hardware, and a purpose-built interactive grid computing middleware, which together significantly accelerate simulation based risk management from weeks and days to minutes or seconds, delivering real-time performance levels, and support for next-generation forecasting and decision-making.

PathWise is the fastest and most highly integrated risk management business solution of its kind. The ASG’s optional “software-as-a-service” model also allows clients to quickly adopt and deploy such advanced technologies on a dedicated and secure infrastructure, managed by Aon Benfield, without the need to build, and support, a new complicated infrastructure from scratch, thereby offering considerable cost savings, stem-to-stern reliability and
run time guarantees.

Productivity

• Through almost complete automation (except for checks and balances with daily control reports, user sign-offs , etc), tight integration and advanced user interfaces, PathWise massively increases the productivity of Variable Annuity risk management, hedging teams and other groups

High Performance and Availability

• Real-time valuation and Greeks computation of millions of variable annuity policies through “brute force” Monte Carlo
• Advanced failover capabilities to guarantee extremely high levels of availability

Transparency

• All business data is visible to business users in real-time through reporting, viewing tools and other interfaces

Benefits 

• PathWise can eliminate many of the high costs and difficulties associated with purchasing, managing and operating alien and very complex variable annuity IT infrastructure, as well as the costs and integration

Advisory Capabilities 

The ASG is uniquely positioned to manage annuity risk. Our personnel are intimately familiar with liability modeling, and therefore are able to better tailor the right trade. In addition, PathWise has a unique capability to run "what-if" scenarios. For example, before a structure solution or an option trade is executed, our personnel are able to estimate the impact on the Greeks, capital and reserves. PathWise SRT, or seriatim real-time tool, is our purpose built tool to manage variable annuity risk. It provides us with synchronized and updated asset and liability Greeks, which means we can trade today with accurate information instead of relying on liability information from yesterday’s close. PathWise SRT can also be leveraged with our proprietary algorithms to improve hedge program performance and lower operational risk, versus other competing solutions.  

Consulting Capabilities 

The ASG can help clients with all manner of consulting projects, including scenario generation, fund mapping, performance attribution systems, grouping and compression, hedge program review, an independent validation.  We are in a unique position to perform all these tasks because we can leverage our experience with the PathWise system to deliver outstanding client value. 

About Aon Benfield 

Aon Benfield, a division of Aon plc (NYSE: AON), is the world’s leading reinsurance intermediary and full-service capital advisor. We empower our clients to better understand, manage and transfer risk through innovative solutions and personalized access to all forms of global reinsurance capital across treaty, facultative and capital markets. As a trusted advocate, we deliver local reach to the world’s markets, an unparalleled investment in innovative analytics, including catastrophe management, actuarial and rating agency advisory. Through our professionals’ expertise and experience, we advise clients in making optimal capital choices that will empower results and improve operational effectiveness for their business. With more than 80 offices in 50 countries, our worldwide client base has access to the broadest portfolio of integrated capital solutions and services. To learn how Aon Benfield helps empower results, please visit aonbenfield.com. 

About Aon Benfield Securities and PathWise 

PathWise and all other securities-related advice, products and services of Aon Benfield are offered and distributed solely through Aon Benfield’s affiliate, Aon Benfield Securities, Inc. which is a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and is registered as a broker-dealer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Aon Benfield Securities, Inc. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aon plc.