Background
Green13 Solutions is an actuarial software company based in the UK, dedicated to transforming the future of actuarial systems. Our focus is on performance, user-friendliness, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. Above all, we prioritize the needs of reporting actuaries at the core of our innovations. Our platform is called Iris and it also utilises AI to help users build actuarial model faster and more efficiently.
Our company has presence in EU, UK, Asia, Africa, with advanced talks with partners in North America and Australia. Green 13 has now over 60 clients, including insurance companies and international consultancies, in over 19 countries with approximately 450 unique users.
Our business model is to partner up with reputable consulting partner who then help us implement our software to clients or who use it for their own purposes within insurance.
Iris is a disruptor in the insurance sector by providing clients with affordable, scalable and innovative solutions enabling them to perform their duties without the need for expensive IT infrastructure, detailed coding knowledge, expensive projects. Being self-funded has enabled us to retain creative control of the direction of the software and also help us keep the cost base low. Our small size enabled us to develop our own bespoke tooling which allowed the development process to scale to the size we are now.
The Iris technology
Iris is an end-to-end, low-code, powerful and modern actuarial projection platform designed with reporting actuaries in mind. It allows users to reduce transformation times from months to weeks or even days, and reduces the need for complex IT projects or large specialist teams. Iris can been used for anything from conventional, unit and investment-linked products, all the way to Variable Annuities, RILAs, including ALM, stochastic and with-profits/dynamic benefit calculations (i.e. with cross-policy interactions)
Iris consists of apps for data, calculations and results, covering the end-to-end actuarial processes. Our apps include:
- Iris-C: C for Calculations, our flagship actuarial projection system.
- Iris-D: D for Data, our data validation system
- Iris-X: X for eXtracts, our extract transformation system
- Iris-SQL: our SQL-style data transformation system.
- Iris-AID: the first ever dedicated actuarial AI Developer, converting product specs to models.
- Iris-Cells: our upcoming spreadsheet-to-code conversion system
- Iris-Automation: the orchestration app, that enables users to run the whole end-to-end reporting process with a touch of a button.
Iris has wider applications, ranging from
- Data validation and data quality
- Experience investigations
- spreadsheet replacement and process automation
- life Insurance pricing
- actuarial model independent validation
- liability and asset valuations
- High performance calculations
- To Helping actuaries fulfil the regular regulatory reporting requirements (IFRS17, Solvency II, HK Regs and more) either as a primary valuation or checking system
Benefits
Our users routinely benefit from
- Enhance reporting times, reducing weeks of work down to minutes by automation
- Reduce headcounts for actuaries dedicated to maintaining the software and configuration, due to the low code nature of the solution
- Enhanced actuarial model run times, due to the technology used, such as grid computing and advanced vectorised processing.
We are now in the 10th year of our operation, and we have grown our client count by a significant factor over the last five years.
Green 13 was founded in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Rob Green and Chris Martis.
Prior to this, Chris, from Edinburgh and Rob, from Isle of Wight (who at the time lived in Swindon), met via Chris’s brother, who worked with Rob at a big-4, who introduced them to each other back in 2012. With a common vision to revolutionise actuarial software, it was not long before they both decided to join forces to create, what is now known, as Iris.
While Chris was working in Milan with a big-4, Rob and Chris had regular calls to brainstorm on ideas on how and why they should build the next generation of actuarial software. Picking the best parts of their own experience and shaped from the pain experienced by being in reporting or actuarial modelling roles using outdated technology, they came up with a vision and requirements on what they had to achieve, to create something truly revolutionary.
In 2013, Chris would contract at very large Insurance company in Dublin which eventually employed Green 13 to help the with the data quality requirements of Solvency II. This is where, along with testing and help from Valia and Sam, Rob and Chris designed and built what would become Iris-D, our data quality app and the first successful Proof of Concept project where Iris-D would be employed by that company.
We started developing our next app, Iris-C, our actuarial projection engine, which was our main goal and aspiration. Chris met with a partner of an actuarial consultancy in Cyprus, who immediately saw the potential of Iris ,and started using the early prototypes of the engine while promoting us to their clients.
At that time Rob met the head of a boutique actuarial consultancy during a flight to Dublin, who were employed by a large insurer in Ireland. Rob shared the vision of Iris-C, which ended in Iris being used to do calculations for the transactions involving that large insurer, concluding our second Proof of Concept, where Iris eventually replaced four legacy platforms there.
Many 1000s of lines of code later, and after our apps where taking more shape with more appearing (such as Iris-X, for large data manipulation, Iris-SQL for database-style-syntax data transformations, Iris-DN, or data-nodes, our low-code automation engine), we were joined by Ross in 2019, who was instrumental in building our next product, which was the IFRS17 reporting engine.
After Ross joined the director team, and after Iris been used at ~60 clients in ~3 continents, Lina also joined us from South Africa, as our actuarial manager, with a view to extend our reach to other markets in the world.
Lina suggested that it would be great if we could feed Iris insurance company specs, and Iris would build models automatically, so we did just that and built Iris-AID (AI Developer).
Green 13 celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. We are excited on the journey to the next 10 years.
Rob Green – Technical Director
Rob has over 35 years’ experience in the European financial services industry. He has been a chief actuary in the UK’s regulator and a partner in a big-4 firm. He is a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. He has worked in product development, financial reporting and finance transformation roles for major insurers, having built several in-house actuarial modelling platforms in his career.
At Green13 Rob leads all technical aspects of our solutions ranging from the colours of the interface to the arrangement of the 1’s and 0’s … and all else in between. Rob is at his happiest when he’s creating new functionality that everyone said was impossible.
Chris Martis – Solutions Director
Chris is an actuary with over 20 years’ experience in the European financial services industry. He has built or reviewed some of the most complex models as an independent contractor and has been a senior manager in a big-4 firm. He is a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
At Green13 Chris leads the development, tailoring and sign-off of our actuarial modelling solutions and is at the heart of our active development of new techniques and Apps to speed up and control all of the key tasks in data quality and calculations. Chris enjoys investigating new technologies, martial arts and playing the drums.
Ross Waddell – Actuarial Director
Ross is an actuary with over 20 years’ experience in the financial services industry. In that time he has worked in a number of areas in three of the top UK insurers, with responsibilities across areas such as Solvency II delivery, assessing and setting internal targets for Capital and Liquidity, Capital Projections, Corporate Transactions, Longevity Analysis, Pricing, and Model Development/Testing. He is a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.
At Green13 Ross leads the development of actuarial and accounting methodology for Solvency II and IFRS17. Ross enjoys his weekly five-a-side matches regardless of Edinburgh’s weather nearly as much as shaping efficient solutions using Iris tools.
Lina Zhu – Actuarial Manager
Lina has 8 years of experience in the actuarial field, primarily at a big-4 auditing firm in South Africa. Lina has worked in areas such as valuations, actuarial modelling, embedded value and auditing. She is an actuary and a Fellow of the Actuarial Society of South Africa.
At Green13, Lina works in the development of actuarial and accounting methodology for IFRS17. Lina enjoys music and is part of the Edinburgh Voice of the Town choir.
