Aon’s tech startup approach is redefining life insurance
When Michelle Lister joined Aon to startup a life consulting practice, she didn’t expect to find a high-performing GPU based life actuarial software ready to use for her projects. But that’s exactly what happened.
“The draw was the excitement of having this startup of a business within a global corporate,” says Lister, now UK/EMEA head of life actuarial consulting at Aon’s Life Solutions. “It was a unique opportunity to really build and create something new and unique. The surprise was all that Aon had to offer, including software, to support this business”
Van Beach, Aon’s global life solutions leader, agrees. Beach has been building technical consulting and software teams in the actuarial space for more than two decades. “Prior to joining Aon, my background included over 25 years of experience with actuarial technology and actuarial consulting,” he says. “Aon provided an incredible opportunity to deliver solutions based on modern technology paired with deep industry expertise, and provide these solutions globally.”
Together, they’re leading what may be one of the most consequential revolutions in actuarial modelling: a GPU-powered transformation that makes traditional CPU-bound platforms look like Nokia flip phones.
A thousand times faster
“On average, it’s providing a thousand times better throughput than all of its CPU-based competitors and it’s nearly a hundred times less expensive to run on GPUs,” says Lister, referring to PathWise, Aon’s High-Performance Modelling (HPM) platform. “And it’s just a game-changer. And it’s not new, PathWise has been used by insurers for over 15 years.”
Developed over 15 years ago to be a solution for hedging risks related to embedded guarantees in insurance products, PathWise has evolved to be ideally suited for modern actuarial modeling requirements. “The speed advantage is analogous to being able to commute from Los Angeles to Singapore in 15 minutes,” Beach says. “That gives a sense of the paradigm shift that we’re introducing in actuarial modelling.”
This isn’t just about speed; it’s about redefining cost, scale, and governance in the post-IFRS 17 era.
PathWise was built for the cloud, designed for GPUs, and architected to address the complexity of current solvency regulations. Regulations and requirements that didn’t exist when legacy systems were written.
“The Solvency II regulations actually required technologies that didn’t exist at the time,” Beach says. “But for an insurer to replace a legacy platform and potentially eliminate the need for proxy models, the new platform needs to be orders of magnitude faster. And with PathWise, being built natively on and optimised for GPU technology, companies are realising those multiple orders of magnitude improvements.”
The numbers speak for themselves. A whole-life valuation involving 350,000 policies, 1,000 scenarios for a 100-year projection was completed on four GPUs in seven minutes and 48 seconds—whereas a legacy CPU system using 100 CPUs took over two hours.
For an Indexed Universal Life product, 50,000 policies and 1,000 scenarios were processed in 7.5 minutes, compared to 7.3 hours on 100 CPUs, with a single GPU providing the same processing power as 1500 CPUs, and representing a 98 per cent cost saving.
A Variable Annuities full nested stochastic job with 1000 outer loop scenarios and 1000 dynamically generated inner loop scenarios at each of 100 time-steps took four days on CPUs. PathWise completed this run in just 10 minutes with 4 GPUs.
A BPA capital model with 1.5m model points and 1m scenarios ran on 16 GPUs and completed in 2.5 hours for under $60. Each GPU was processing in excess of 10 million policy projections every second. Let that last one sit for a moment.
“While we have a proven solution, we are embracing the opportunity as if we’re a tech startup. The success that we’re having in the marketplace is driven by companies wanting significantly better efficiency, productivity, agility, and insights – it’s purely business-driven,” Beach explains.
“Right now there are not an abundance of regulatory changes driving new requirements, rather what we’re seeing is a response to an accumulation of historical changes, and a recognition that new solutions are needed.”
This shift reflects a broader pattern across finance and insurance: legacy tech is being cannibalised by cloud-native, GPU-optimised solutions. And while regulators might not be actively turning the screws today, the aftershocks of Solvency II, IFRS 17 and GAAP LDTI are still echoing through the actuarial stacks.
“A core value at Aon is our commitment to leveraging technology and analytics to drive better business decisions,” says Beach.
A comprehensive modelling suite
PathWise isn’t just a run-fast engine. It’s a comprehensive modelling suite that includes a Modelling Studio with a spreadsheet-like interface and GPU muscle, an Analytics Studio for Python-based ETL and data management, an optimized internal data store, visual tools for drag-and-drop workflow orchestration, and a full slate of tools for production execution and management. Cash flow modeling, economic scenario generation, capital modeling, accounting sub-ledger, data ETL, and more are all addressed with Aon’s solution suite.
In Lister’s view, that breadth matters: “I genuinely believe that Aon can offer a full end-to-end solution without any gaps at all along the way, which is very exciting. Our life consulting practice and technology work together to provide support and solutions for all business challenges.
“A clear example of this is the increasing interest among insurers in expanding their operations or indeed entering the UK and US PRT market. We have an incredible team with deep expertise focused on this which is led by myself in the UK. This includes life and pensions actuaries, who combine their skills to assist existing and new entrants to the market. Our support is wide ranging but typically covers pricing deals, assumption setting, cleaning data, onboarding schemes, reserving and optimising capital holdings through reinsurance and other methods. This combination of skills and the use of PathWise technology aims to offer practical advantages in a competitive market.”
There’s also a human capital story here. Legacy systems with slow runtimes and opaque logic not only cost money, but they also burn out talent. Long nights spent waiting on runs. With PathWise, actuaries spend time analysing, not waiting.
“The entire process was automated in PathWise and the client was able to generate results in minutes with a single click of a button,” one case study notes.
And in the UK specifically, where actuarial consultants have long served as the back-office brains of the insurance and pensions industries, demand is rising.
What PathWise represents is not just a technical upgrade. It’s the arrival of actuarial intelligence at the speed of business.
“For insurers and solution providers to address modern risk management challenges, their platforms need to be orders of magnitude better,” Beach reiterates. And Aon seems to be betting the future that PathWise is.