Gavin Ritchie
IT Director
Gavin spent his previous career in software development and database design in a variety of employed and independent roles. Development activities for Life Insurance systems proved a launching pad to a collaboration with Stephen Richards, and the Longevitas application suite was born. Alongside steering the IT function, Gavin is the primary developer for database, Java and web-related technologies.
Articles written by Gavin Ritchie
Personal standards
Love them or loathe them, actuaries cannot get by without standard tables in some shape or form. Even when performing analysis of your own experience data to avoid basis risk, standard tables are often used as a kind of lingua franca between parties, a convenient way to express approximate results in a way everyone can understand.
Open verdict
If any doubt about Linux and Open Source technologies existed in Enterprise IT departments it must surely have been erased by last week's news: The London Stock Exchange, one of the engines that propelled the UK to the top of the World Economic Forum rankings, has invested in a Linux trading platform.
Beginner's guide to postcode pricing
We've created a short graphical summary of the application of postcode-driven lifestyle within actuarial mortality models.
Postcode pricing in 15 minutes!
Just a short post to announce we've revised our overview videos for both Longevitas and mortalityrating.com.
Transforming the user experience
We were asked recently whether the rating reports from mortalityrating.com could be extracted into a Microsoft Office format to use in an automated document production process. As the actual reports are in Adobe PDF format, tackling this question head-on wouldn't necessarily be easy.
Concentrate!
One of the challenges in modelling financial portfolios is the concentration of risk arising from the fact wealthier people will usually have significantly higher benefits than the less well-off.
Confounding compounding
Earlier posts discussed the importance of deduplication in annuity portfolios and pension schemes and some of the issues around the deduplication of names, specifically the use of double metaphone to look through common variant spellings of the surname or family name.
Modelling and the maple leaf
We get a lot of interest in our software from Canada. We don't know specifically why this might be — despite that fact that two of our founders are Scottish, we are not aware of any distant relatives still panning for gold out there.
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Not all security strategies need be as dramatic as those proposed by Mission Impossible, but anyone offering SaaS needs to ensure data is accessible by only authorised users.
Parallel processing
A colleague of mine once described parallel processing as the "work of the devil". I don't know if I'd go quite this far — this statement was made in the early nineties, when technology was that little bit less advanced than it is today.