Major life insurer : Insurance premium quote system

Pricing actuaries at a top life insurance company used several spreadsheets to calculate the premiums for all their term, whole life, universal life and accident policies. Given the insured’s age, risk class, health, lifestyle, location, etc., a complex premium calculation was performed, which involved millions of cells with formulas and tables. Before Calc2Code, these were converted to compiled programs by hand. Every time a spreadsheet changed, it required recoding. This was expensive, and created long delays that kept the company from rolling out new premium calculations, potentially costing the company new sales or required them to take on risk without being properly compensated for it. The company was embarking on a new initiative to provide their sales agents around the US with laptops that could be used in the field for instantly quoting new business to customers and illustrating forecasts of account values over the customer’s lifetime. Calc2Code was used to convert each spreadsheet to a DLL which could then be called from the client’s quoting application, written by the in-house IT department. The quote application required that the converted DLL run extremely fast to ensure the sales rep would not have to be slowed down in their presentations. Calc2Code gave them the runtime speed they required, and also allowed them to quickly convert updated premium calculations to the sales force as soon as the actuaries were done with the spreadsheets. The actuaries were able to continue working in their preferred Excel environment, and it was easier for the company to audit and test each spreadsheet in Excel before Calc2Code’s compilation.

Hedge fund : CDO calculation and mark to market

A hedge fund that specialized in credit derivatives traded CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). These are extremely complex securities which are often priced and managed via Monte Carlo simulation requiring thousands of random runs. As a hedge fund they required calculation speed, but their pricing model was built in Excel VBA and very slow. With Calc2Code they were able to convert the VBA to a compiled C++ addin, and got a 400 fold speed boost.

Global reinsurer : Economic scenario simulation

A major reinsurance company had a portfolio of diverse securities. They ran a simulation of many country’s economies, and the various traded markets in each one as well as currency exchange rates among the different countries. This allowed them to measure the risk of their portfolio. It was written in a large Excel workbook that also used some VBA. Calc2Code was used to convert the entire calculation to a single function call. The original calculation ran overnight, but the new version with Calc2Code ran 300 times faster, so an eight hour run could now be done in less than two minutes.

Major global conglomerate : Knowledge base of implemented algorithms

A large corporation, with over 300,000 employees, embarked on a project to allow their divisions to share their work and avoid a lot of duplicated effort. One part of this was to make spreadsheets that employees created that performed specific calculations available in a central repository, but in a form that could be used by anyone in the firm. By converting the spreadsheets with Calc2Code, the algorithms developed by the spreadsheet creator were available to others as both spreadsheet addin functions, as well as compiled DLL libraries.

Polling firm : Lexical parser for processing survey responses

A company performed surveys for their clients. The surveys were often distributed to respondents as Excel spreadsheets with the answers entered into empty cells. The answers could be numbers, but also text. They had automated the consolidation of the responses across all the spreadsheets they got back for a particular survey, but they needed to manually go through each one first to put the responses into the proper format as there were often input errors in the response. With Calc2Code they were able to easily create complex formulas in Excel which parsed responses and made them usable to the consolidation step.

Software company : Convert client spreadsheets for integration within their system

An insurance risk management software vendor had clients which often used spreadsheets to model some of their non-standard insurance products. The system vendor needed to incorporate all products in their customer’s implementation, and were forced to hand-code the conversion of the Excel spreadsheet into a DLL that could be called by their risk management system. With Calc2Code that process was largely automated, saving the vendor time, money, and giving them a competitive advantage in making the sale to their client.

Systems integrator: Streamline process for property manager doing database access in Excel COM server

A US consultancy had a UK client which was managing their large property portfolio using Excel. Part of the calculations involved interfacing to a database. They were using Excel as a COM server as it was simple for them to drive Excel in this fashion, but it ran very slowly. The consultancy came in to streamline the process, and part of it required replacing the Excel piece with a callable DLL. With the Calc2Code generated DLL instead of Excel, the process ran 5000 times faster.