12 Conclusions

After the application had been completed, a meeting was organised with a group of actuaries (listed alphabetically in the Appendix) to showcase the app, gain feedback, and to ascertain their views on R in the actuarial industry - the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Many of the actuaries present could see the value of using R over more traditional actuarial computing programs. It was also noted that tools such as the application that was built for this project would be of great use in the financial advising industry, as the visualisations and ease of use would greatly aid understanding of difficult to grasp financial concepts. Finally, a number of the actuaries present indicated that the presentation had inspired them to try learn R for themselves - the application had done its job. It was emphasised to those present that many of the functionalities that looked impressive and intimidating when wrapped in R Shiny could be replicated using basic R Scripts - with a less steep learning curve.

It is clear that there is an appetite for R, or similar coding based philosophies, in the actuarial industry. With proprietary software such as Excel, there is only so much that can be done - whereas with a more robust coding language such as R, there is easy access to open-source packages, impressive visualisations, easy data-cleaning, web-based frameworks, and more… Once you have the drive and motivation to learn the language, the possibilities are endless.