infinada.com - Consulting Services

Consulting Services

infinada Consulting GmbH provides consulting, coaching and training services in the following areas:

Statistics, Data Analysis & Data Science

analysis of data, including large collections of unstructured data ("NoSQL", "big data")
application of statistics and machine learning; data analysis with R and Python ("data science")
forecasting and classification ("business analytics")

Valuation and Risk Models for Complex Financial Products

valuation of complex financial products (e.g. financial derivatives) and insurance liabilities (e.g. variable annuities)
portfolio optimization and asset-liability management (ALM)
risk models covering market risk, counterparty credit risk, insurance risks (life, health, non-life) and operational risks

Actuarial Consulting

actuarial analyses of life and health experience data, supporting product design, pricing, reserving and risk modeling
creation and improvement of actuarial assumptions for pricing and reserving
business analyst tasks, like interface management, business specification and test management
optimization of reinsurance cover

Independent Model Validation

independent model validation of risk models in the context of Solvency II
independent validation of credit risk and market risk models in the context of Basel III and IV

Strategy Consulting & Coaching

coaching one or more IT teams (e.g. as Scrum master)
project management in traditional and agile projects
consulting on data strategy, risk strategy, business processes and organizational structure
Scrum, Kanban
mentoring

Data Analysis Tools

NoSQL databases (like Redis and MongoDB) are powerful tools allowing to process fast-flowing, unstructured data.

R has been the leading open source statistical software package since 1997. Python and R have been the two dominant analytics languages in the "big data" and "machine learning" context.

Complex Financial Products

Life insurance and pension contracts (e.g. variable annuities) are among the most complex financial products. They are a challenge to properly value and risk-manage due to (1) their long-term nature, (2) the multitude of product parameters and (3) the optionality originating from the options for the policyholder to adjust the contract parameters and for the insurance company to adjust the management of the portfolio.

Independent Model Validation and Quality Assurance

Independent validation of internal models in the context of Solvency II has been one of the main activities of infinada Consulting GmbH since 2016.

Concerns have been voiced that future systems employing "machine learning" might be so complex that humans will be unable to test or validate their reliability. The key to maintaining control over complex systems is to tell the difference between models which can be validated and models which cannot be validated. For the full story see the February 2020 essay "Why model validation is feasible".

Management

Scrum is a popular agile software development method.

Kanban is a method of increasing throughput and quality in business processes, originally developed by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota. The main principles setting it apart from other "lean" methods are (1) strict adherence to work-in-progress limits, (2) later process steps pull work items instead of earlier process steps pushing them and (3) in case of a bottleneck the whole process chain is stopped and the team joins forces to remove the bottleneck.