Executive Summary

This project seeks to demonstrate R’s [2] ability to serve as a useful tool in the life and pensions industry. Research was conducted into the industry, and the “R for Actuaries” talks held by the Society of Actuaries in Ireland (SAI) served as a starting point [23–26]. The talks discussed the benefits of R and shed light on its prevalence in the actuarial world. Building on these talks, interviews were organised with industry professionals to gain further insight into the sector’s slow uptake of R. Additionally, the interviewees gave their thoughts on various directions that the project could take.

Following this research, it became apparent that the pensions sector offered the greatest potential for optimisations using R. The discovery phase highlighted an over-reliance on programs such as Excel. R packages such as LifeContingencies [22] and ggplot2 [9] could further aid actuaries, offering efficiencies and powerful visualisation tools.

It was ultimately decided to demonstrate R’s ability by means of example: to create an web application consisting of typical tasks performed in the pensions industry. This program was built using R Shiny [3] and associated libraries [4–7]. The application’s main focuses were to:

1. Project Future Values of Retirement Funds, while adhering to the SAI’s ASP Guidence Note [27] on Statements of Reasonable Projections (SORPs)
2. Stochastically Simulate Pension Drawdown Scenarios

From this base, many other pages and functionalities would arise.