Rating Engine

Overview
The Landscape Rating Engine provides a comprehensive toolset to allow the definition of insurance products and product versions. It is equally capable of being utilised in either an underwriting or broking environment.

The Rating Engine can be deployed either as a standalone application or as an integrated part of the Landscape Insurance Administration System. As the rating engine takes in its risk information and outputs results in the form of XML, it can easily be integrated with other systems or run as a quoting service (either for a single product or to provide comparative quotes from a panel of products).

Major Features

The output from the rating engine can include endorsements, policy limits, excesses, notes, refer/decline reasons, as well as details of how the premium was arrived at (individual loads/discounts) and, optionally, how it should be split between commission, insurer, IPT, etc (both gross and net rates can be handled).

The fact that new entities and attributes can easily be incorporated into the internal data dictionary means that virtually any type of insurance product can be defined within the rating engine. This can provide significant user training and software licence cost savings.

The rating engine has a standard Windows user interface providing intuitive functionality for anyone familiar with PC software. Product writers do not write programming code – most tasks are accomplished by selecting from lists or dragging and dropping data. Import facilities allow rating data and code lists to be loaded from external sources such as Excel data files or the ABI Online software. Alternatively, spreadsheet data can be dropped directly in to rating tables using standard Windows copy and paste functionality.

Productivity gains are made because product components, such as tables, rules and subroutines (blocks of processing), are reusable across multiple schemes. Each component can have multiple versions, providing a full history, allowing the system to produce quotes ‘as at’ a date in the past.

Product Test Harness and Debugging
Once products have been defined within the system there is a powerful product test and debugging sub-system, which allows the product builder to verify the accuracy of the scheme. Here, example risks can be defined and applied to products. The debugging tools allow breakpoints to be defined within the scheme logic, allowing the user to see all internal variables as well seeing the XML output file changing dynamically as the scheme is evaluated. The user can step through each stage of the product evaluation, enabling product development problems to be easily solved. Help is provided in the form of an online HTML help system and a detailed training course is available to allow product builders to quickly get an intimate knowledge of this set of tools.