PathWise Uses Amazon EC2 to Model Customer Data Hundreds of Times Faster Than Legacy Solutions

All it takes is one big financial mistake to put a business in peril. That’s why many of North America’s largest life insurance companies rely on PathWise®, a high performance computing (HPC) enterprise risk-management solution from professional services firm Aon. PathWise allows (re)insurers and pension funds to access next-generation technology to rapidly solve today’s key insurance challenges. It is a single enterprise solution for financial and regulatory reporting, dynamic and macro hedging programs, economic scenario generation, new product development and pricing, and business planning forecasting for budgeting and planning.

Companies use PathWise enterprise hedging solutions to protect tens of millions of individuals’ retirement savings through its dynamic and macro hedging solutions. Because its system uses real-time capital markets information and performs real-time calculations on both assets and liabilities jointly without any shortcuts, clients are in a better position to view, understand, and manage their risk. The platform has long relied on cloud compute capacity from Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a recent move to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 Instances powered by NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs positioned PathWise to be even faster, more accurate, and more reliable.

Initially operating with an on-premises system, PathWise moved to an AWS Cloud solution in 2011, and it hasn’t looked back.  

AWS’s vast and varied computing infrastructure helped PathWise deliver for clients, easily aligning to changing technologies and PathWise’s changing needs. PathWise initially ran Amazon EC2 G2 Instances, which are intended for graphics and general-purpose GPU compute applications. As the software’s workload grew, it moved to Amazon EC2 P2 Instances—powerful, scalable instances that provide GPU-based parallel compute capabilities for server-side workloads requiring massive parallel floating-point processing power.

Major insurance companies have millions of policies, as well as financial shocks and thousands of market scenarios to consider when running models on PathWise. The GPUs provided by AWS instances enable PathWise to run these immense calculations in parallel, completing calculations in seconds or minutes that can take days or weeks in legacy systems.

But the innovation didn’t end there. When AWS released Amazon EC2 P3 Instances powered by NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, which deliver up to one petaflop of mixed-precision performance per instance to significantly accelerate machine learning and high-performance computing applications, PathWise began moving its workloads once again to take advantage of the new generation of GPUs. The move gave PathWise’s customers a noticeable sixfold speed improvement. Now PathWise offers the fastest modeling speeds per unit cost in the industry today, at 300–10,000 times faster than legacy solutions.

This increased speed and capacity were crucial for end users who use PathWise’s grid monitoring console application to track their jobs. PathWise and its users also benefit from the 99.999 percent uptime provided by AWS. Part of the reliability of PathWise relies on this uptime from AWS, as does having the flexibility to scale computing resources up or down to match customer demand. PathWise clients have control and line of sight into the cost of adding more users, compute power, and storage, all backed by service-level agreements. So, as their business conditions change, companies can adjust quickly and enjoy the benefit of new and better technology as it arrives in the marketplace rather than order it themselves, set it up, and manage it.

And while speed and performance are PathWise’s primary objectives, security is equally important. The company must comply with SOC 2 audits and penetration testing to ensure its data is securely managed in the interest of both the company and its clients. To run models through PathWise software, customers are necessarily sharing sensitive data that must be protected. The company’s compliance is dependent on the security of its virtual private cloud environments in AWS. PathWise's clients feel safe with AWS, as it’s secure and robust, while noting that AWS boosts PathWise’s excellent reputation for security from being a fully transparent business solution when it comes to internal audits. The company's systems that run in AWS undergo annual SOC 2 Type 2 audit. Thus, customers see layers of security protection and awareness when running information through PathWise.

In an industry where speed matters even under normal circumstances, emergency scenarios highlight why high performance is especially crucial to PathWise and its customers. When natural disasters and other emergencies strike—such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted much of the world’s workforce and caused extreme market volatility in 2020—PathWise is a steadfast support for customers. As a cloud-based modeling enterprise software solution versus an on-premises software solution, PathWise is designed to deliver high performance in volatile situations.

Thanks in part to the speed and performance of Amazon EC2 P3 Instances, the PathWise software can incorporate updated market data into customers’ models, showing the next market exposures in real time without approximations, allowing its insurance customers to make informed decisions quickly and move forward confidently when managing their risk.

With years of successful innovation behind it, PathWise has a culture that drives its continued improvement, both for existing customers and for its expanding customer base. PathWise has spent more than a decade pursuing its mission to provide a complete enterprise risk solution for its customers, and integrating AWS tools is enabling it to do so more effectively.  

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.