1. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk A Smart (and Cheap) way to connect R and Excel Alberto Chierici Senior Consultant | Actuarial & Advanced Analytics Deloitte MCS Limited Hill House, Little New Street, London EC4A 3TR, UK Tel/Direct: +44 020 7007 3287 | Mobile: +44 078 3117 1157 achierici@deloitte.co.uk | www.deloitte.co.uk Bobby Shang Actuarial Specialist Chubb Insurance Company of Europe SE 106 Fenchurch Street, London, EC3M 5NB UK T: +44 20 7956 5126 @: bshang@chubb.com W: www.chubb.com/uk Twitter: @ChubbEurope

2. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Business Case We both do actuarial work in the insurance industry Business users of actuarial model (mainly underwriters) love Excel and don’t want to know anything about R Sharing a model across a large organisations is challenging for: Version control Software installation Service desk support Rolling out new versions of software End user IT literacy

3. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk R is great! Needless to say why…

4. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Excel is notthat great When running statistical models, simulations, crunching big datasets Excel is not a great tool: Slow Limited capacity VBA is 0.001% coding and 99.999% debugging Not easy to follow and document No ggplot2! Fortunately there are many ways to connect R and Excel - http://www.r-bloggers.com/a-million-ways-to-connect-r-and-excel/ http://www.r-bloggers.com/a-million-ways-to-connect-r-and-excel/

5. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Our Story RExcel is no longer free for commercial applications The user doesn’t want to be bothered from actuaries or the IT department every time a new version of R, RExcel or Excel is available The user doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know about R Let’s see how we dealt with such problems…

6. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Demo

7. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk We like our solution because R is installed remotely, no need to install it on the user’s computer Easy to manage Fast Free

8. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Some pitfalls Perhaps not very elegant Keep models up to date with R/packages new releases Other ideas?

9. Bobby Shang – Actuarial Specialist bshang@chubb.com Alberto Chierici – Senior Consultant achierici@deloitte.co.uk Thank you!