…Per Aspera: The Last Few Obstacles on the Way to Digital Paradise

No doubt, technology will irreversibly change the insurance industry and all related professions from underwriting to marketing to actuarial. Sure enough, there are (or will be) multiple publications that speculate on how good and profound these changes will be and try to describe bright digital future of the insurance industry. However, there is no literature which explains how to get there and what has to be done before actuaries can reap all the benefits of computerization. Looking at the essentials of the major actuarial tasks, the author finds analogies in areas as close to actuarial as banking and finance and as distant as 3D animation and CAD. The paper suggests borrowing the ideas from other industries that have already been successfully computerized, and adapting and implementing them in the actuarial field. Looking at the digitized industries, the author could not help but notice that the major facilitator and a necessary condition for successful computerization was existence and proliferation of the standards. The paper arrives to the conclusion that Actuaries as a society of professionals have to develop and implement practical standards in the following areas of their activity: Data Interchange, Actuarial Algorithms, Representation of Results and End Users’ Computer Literacy. The paper’s goal is to pinpoint technological issues in these areas that cannot be resolved without actuarial assistance.