Show Notes
Every reinsurance office has a spreadsheet only one person understands, and this episode is about why that's the industry's biggest quiet risk. Jerad and Ben start by defending spreadsheets properly, Spreadsheet Olympics included, before turning on the very flexibility that makes them dangerous. It's not really about Excel: it's about what happens the day the person who built it doesn't work there anymore. WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: Why the industry's "singular greatest key person risk" isn't a person — it's whoever built the spreadsheet they left behind How a single overwritten cell can undo months of pricing or placement work, and why "version 9 vs version 10" rarely tells you what actually changed Why massive spreadsheets grind to a halt, and the workaround actuaries already use to keep them alive What reinsurance can borrow from software engineering's approach to tracking changes, instead of hoping nobody touches the macro Why most firms are already auditing which processes are one bus ride away from disaster
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OUTLINE & TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Intro01:00 Why Reinsurance Loves Spreadsheets02:19 From Spreadsheet Olympics to Spreadsheet Risk05:14 When Spreadsheet Utility Starts to Break Down08:23 Why Replacing Excel Is So Hard11:30 The Problem with “Utopian” Spreadsheets14:06 Key-Person Dependency & the Bus Factor17:12 Keeping Flexibility, Adding Auditability20:04 Rethinking Data Transformation23:19 What Reinsurance Can Learn from GitHub24:57 What Shouldn’t Live in a Spreadsheet28:37 Spreadsheet Dystopia & Outro
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