My Journey @Moody’s RMS

Adarsh Raghav
4 min readApr 29, 2023

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Quant, finance, and economics have always been an integral part of my learning curve, and complemented with computer science it has been a dream combination. So, it was truly a dream when I received the opportunity to interview for one of the largest financial firms in the world, Moody’s Corporation, for their risk analyst position. Even though the interviews were challenging and intriguing, I kept my confidence and was determined to pass through with it. In the end, I was able to secure a position at Moodys RMS.

For the past few months, I have been fortunate enough to be interning at Risk Management Solutions(RMS) which is a subsidiary of Moody’s Analytics. Risk Management Solutions (RMS) is an organization that builds software solutions for analyzing catastrophe risk of insurers and re-insurers portfolios. They’ve been in this business for more than 30 years serving clients across the world and have recently been acquired by Moody’s Analytics. RMS’s main mission is understanding risk, integrating analytics, and sharing its expertise more broadly. RMS has various products mounting in different industries, however, their main focus is on the insurance industry with products such as Risk Modeler, ExposureIQ, UnderwriteIQ, and Treaty IQ.

My Day 1 at RMS

Risk Management Solutions (RMS) is an organization that builds software solutions for analyzing catastrophe risk of insurers and re-insurers portfolios. They’ve been in this business for more than 30 years serving clients across the world and have recently been acquired by Moody’s Analytics. RMS’s main mission is understanding risk, integrating analytics, and sharing its expertise more broadly.

Our first week was similar to a induction/introduction week, where the following happened:

  • We were greeted with new joinee kits, each containing a bottle, a notebook and a mug from moody’s, along with a welcome message for the people’s team.
  • Then we had a small session with the IT team as they provided us with laptops and login credentials with which we were to access company resources.
  • All necessary paperwork, agreements etc where processed during this time.
  • Later down the week we were invited for lunch by the managing director himself, he gave us insights about his career and tips to having a successful life and ambitions.
  • Throughout the week we had various presentations guiding us about the work that RMS does, how it impacts us, and its stakeholders.

Week 2 to Week 11

  • Training & Learning: under went 2 months of complete training. This training encompassed with giving us an overview of the insurance & reinsurance industry, catastrophe modelling and the major functioning/products of risk management.
  • Assessments and live projects: For all the concepts that we had learned we were also supposed to give assessments to assess our knowledge and how much we had grasped. This also included hands on live projects on RMS proprietary software such as RiskLink, Risk Modeller 2.0, ExposureIQ, TreatyIQ.
  • Quality Engineering(QE): I’ve just completed training and now I’m being onboarded onto the QE team to test new releases of Risk Modeller 2.0 and all the HD Models for it.

Our training mainly focused on insurance and reinsurance concepts as the the work continued to be closely knitted to those concepts. Our training was conducted in office by senior managers and leaders with a long history of experience. The training majorly focused on these concepts:

  • Insurance and reinsurance: we were taught the basics of these concepts combined with the math that goes into calculating premiums and total insured values.
  • Catastrophe Modelling: Since cat modelling was a very niche concept and only a few people new about it, introduction was almost necessary.
  • RMS Products: We had thorough training with regards to RMS products and their usage. In fact we also had live sessions and assignments regarding each software.
  • Written and verbal communication: we were given training with regards to communicating in the workspace be it verbal, over email or via zoom.
  • Final assessment: A final assessment was conducted to verify that we had accurately understood the concepts.

Week 12 to Week 18

  • Presentation with leadership team: As our training culminated we were invited to give a presentation of all our learnings and understandings, infant of the leadership team. This was a great opportunity to present ourselves in-front of the leadership team and create some sort of impact.
  • Assigning Managers & Teams: After a successful presentation and competition of training we were allotted our managers and teams. I had been assigned to the Quality Engineering Team (QE) under the leadership to Pradeep Kumar Dahiya.
  • Regression Testing: Up till now I have completed 2 live regression cycles on the RM 2.0 software. This process involved a lot of testing and raising of bugs that may appear on RM.

Learnings

  • Treading Uncharted Territories: since my very first day I had little idea about the Insurance and reinsurance industry or cat modelling. So this was a completely new industry to me and a great a challenge, which lead to something new being learned.
  • Use of proprietary software: since the software was in a niche segment of the market, with all its use cases being licensable, it was very difficult to find resources to learn about it online and hence most had to be absorbed from people in the system that were using it.
  • Working with a global team: Initially it was very different to match time for meetings and interactions as most of the team was either in the UK or US region and their time zones operated very differently.

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Adarsh Raghav
Adarsh Raghav

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