Meet the team - Rob Green

This is a quick Q&A with Rob Green, the Technical Director of Green 13.

Rob has over 30 years' experience in the European financial services industry.?He has been a chief actuary in the UK's regulator and a partner in a big-4 firm.?He is a fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.?He has worked in product development, financial reporting and finance transformation roles for major insurers.?

Rob is at his happiest when he's creating new functionality that everyone said was impossible.

Q1 - Rob, why did you embark on this journey with Green 13? (and what is the story with number 13?)

After working with actuarial systems for a large part of my career this area was always my favourite.?I was part of a team that created a new system back in the 1990s so I had some idea of what was required and knew that with the right tools and the right people a small team could create a new system from scratch in a few years.?13 has always been my favourite number, the company was created in 2013 and a half-marathon is my favourite distance to run.

Q2 - What is your main job at Green 13?

I’ve led the development of the core engine of the system since we started.?This covers the compiler, the grid functionality and all the tricky little bits and pieces that glue the system together.

Q3 - What is your top moment at Green 13 so far?

There have been lots of them!?Highlights include getting the Iris–C engine working and seeing how fast it was and more recently getting the core of the engine to on the new generation of Mac with Apple Silicon M1 chips.?I get the greatest buzz out of seeing new clients using Iris somewhere thousands of miles away over Teams, which is an increasingly frequent pleasure.

Q4 - What is Iris and how is Iris-C different?

The overall Iris system is an actuarial calculation engine that can cover cashflows, data quality and manages complex end-to-end processes for IFRS17, Solvency II reporting and more.?If you feed in a data extract, some accounting actuals and some assumptions Iris can do the rest.

Iris–C is our core calculation engine.?The key feature of Iris–C is that you don’t need to write long and complicated programs to model product features: you tabulate business rules and let the Iris–C compiler do the hard work of optimisation, defining all the loops and other boring aspects.?This makes it easier to create and understand the models than with many other platforms or tools and actuaries can focus most of their attention on business rules and results.

Q5 - What is AVX, and what are the benefits?

AVX is parallel processing that’s built into nearly all office CPUs since 2012. It allows us to calculate 4 or 8 policies at the same time in Iris–C and is one of the ways that we get the great performance from the system.

Q6 - Why did you choose C++ for Iris? (and not something else?)

From my perspective as the systems architect, C++ was the natural choice as it provides low-level control over the computer and it can unlock all of its performance.?C++ is a bit of a hardcore language and environment and others (say Python or R) can be much more approachable, but they don’t usually allow the creation of the fastest applications.?There’s nothing stopping users integrating some of their favourite Python or R with Iris, but although we embrace those environments we’ve not needed to use them: at the end of the day everything is 1s and 0s and C++ moves those around very fast and with a high level of control.

Q7 - Any other tech news to share about what you are working on, on Iris?

The work to get the core engine running on Apple Silicon was done in parallel with work to make it run on Linux too.?This Linux development will be used in a new release of Iris that will enable Linux machines to be added to an Iris–Grid and also offer a way to scale an Iris–Grid using advanced cloud resources.?This won’t be something that all clients will want to use, but some will appreciate having that option.

Q8 - What is the most challenging thing about being in a new actuarial platform start-up?

There was a lot of work to be done in the early years to create the foundations of the system and all the supporting materials: many of these things nobody ever sees but they need to be there as foundations.?Climbing the first mountain to get production features took a long time – and there’s always more that can be done – but now that we have many clients getting their reporting done each quarter I don’t hear about any problems or missing functionality I know that the “start-up” pains are behind us.

Q9 - What is your favourite past time?

My spare time is being consumed by renovating a Victorian house and playing the trombone in a brass band.?

These are joint favourites, but I’m not sure my neighbours would agree.

Q10 - Last, tell us one fun fact about yourself?

Back to the number 13, I once ran a half marathon every week for a year.