Weeks, not hours
Every rate cycle collides with the engineering backlog, so the business waits.
Shipping today
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ValuNova
Spreadsheets and Word-document specs, replaced by a governed, audited, API-enabled calculation engine with an AI co-pilot. Business users author, version, test, approve and operate complex numerical logic — without writing or deploying application code.
4Field types — Input, Formula, Rate, C# code
35+Date, Math, Text, Financial and Logical functions
6Role tiers with per-product access scoping
6AI co-pilot features, all human-approved
The problem
A rate change should not need a release
In most insurers and lenders, a new product variant or a rate revision means a developer sprint, a code release and a UAT pass. Meanwhile the actual logic lives in a spreadsheet nobody can version, with cell drift and broken references that nobody catches until a customer disputes a number.
Unreproducible
When a regulator or ombudsman asks why a number was what it was in 2023, the answer is a scramble.
Error-prone
Spreadsheet logic has no type checking, no peer review, no test gate and no audit trail.
Capabilities
What ValuNova does
Everything below is implemented in the shipping application — this is not a roadmap.
Dynamic field engine
Templates are composed of fields of four kinds — Input (validated capture), Formula (NCalc-Edge expressions), Rate (SQL-pushdown table lookup) and CSharpCode (Roslyn-compiled at runtime, cached, type-checked). A single template can mix all four.
Rate table management
First-class, versioned rate tables at global, product and template scope, with effective-from/to dates and Draft/Active states. Bulk Excel upload via SqlBulkCopy, and frozen snapshots on activation so historical recalculations reproduce the original numbers exactly.
Versioning & approval workflow
Draft → Testing → Active, with Rejected as a terminal alternative. Configurators edit drafts, testers must clear a minimum-test-case quality gate, product owners activate. Previous versions are preserved, and side-by-side comparison exports to PDF.
Single & bulk calculation
An interactive form for one-off calculations, or an Excel upload processed as a Hangfire background job with real-time SignalR progress in the browser. Expression caching and indexed rate lookups carry the high-volume runs.
What-if & scenario analysis
Override input fields and rate lookups and re-run a scenario without persisting it — for pricing exploration, customer counselling and sensitivity testing.
External API
Policy admin, CRM, agent portals and broker sites call ValuNova directly. API keys stored as SHA-256 hashes with optional IP allow-lists, per-minute and per-day rate limits, expiry and per-product access scope. Every call is logged for billing, debugging and compliance.
AI co-pilot
Six AI features. Zero autonomy.
ValuNova integrates the Anthropic Claude API through a hardened client with Polly retry and circuit breaking. The AI removes the most tedious parts of a configurator's job and explains opaque results to non-technical reviewers — humans always approve.
- Test case generator — synthesises test data from a template's field metadata
- Formula generator — drafts NCalc formulas from natural-language requirements
- C# code generator — drafts the body of CSharpCode fields
- Result interpretation — explains why a calculation produced a given number
- Anomaly detection — flags outlier rows in bulk results
- What-if suggestion — proposes interesting scenario parameter sets
Enterprise-grade, not a thin API call
- Prompts stored in database tables with versioning, variables and per-domain context — change a prompt without redeploying
- PII anonymisation before send, restored on response
- Response caching by input hash with per-feature TTL
- Per-user quotas, per-minute and per-day
- Audit log of every request and response with token counts and estimated cost
- Managed end to end from a super-admin AI management console
The AI features require an Anthropic API key — and can be switched off entirely if a hosted LLM is not acceptable in your environment.
Governance
Built to survive an audit
Full audit trail
CREATE / UPDATE / DELETE / CALCULATE / UPLOAD captured with old and new values, user, IP and timestamp. Serilog writes to console, file and a SQL audit table, with combined export to Excel or CSV.
Six-role RBAC
SuperAdmin, Admin, ProductOwner, ProductTester, ProductConfigurator and User, enforced by named policies — plus per-user product access so one platform can serve multiple business units.
Security posture
Strong password policy, lockout after five failures, 2-hour sliding sessions with security-stamp revalidation, secure cookies, HSTS with preload, CSP, frame and MIME protections, header suppression.
Impact analysis before activation. Before a new version goes live, see exactly which existing calculations it would affect — then replay any historical calculation against its frozen template version and rate snapshot to reproduce the original result.
Beyond insurance
Generic engine, insurance heritage
ValuNova was built for life-insurance surrender value, maturity, death benefit, bonus, loan, paid-up and fund-value computations across traditional, ULIP and annuity products. The engine itself is domain-neutral — inputs, lookups, formulas, versioned and approved.
| Domain | Representative calculations |
|---|---|
| Life insurance | Surrender value, maturity and death benefit, paid-up and loan value, ULIP fund value, bonus and guaranteed additions |
| General & health insurance | Premium rating across factors and discount tables, claims reserving and IBNR, no-claim-bonus and renewal pricing |
| Banking & lending | EMI and amortisation, prepayment penalties, foreclosure charges, versioned interest rate cards, reward and cash-back rules |
| Wealth & pensions | Annuity payouts by option, corpus accumulation projections, tax-adjusted returns, goal-based what-if planning |
| Sales incentives | Multi-tier commission ladders, claw-backs and accelerators, queried in real time from a CRM |
| Telecom & utilities | Tariff plans with usage-tier lookups, promotional discount rules, jurisdiction taxes, high-volume bulk billing runs |
| Healthcare reimbursement | DRG and procedure-code pricing with effective dates, co-pay and deductible logic per plan, per-claim audit trail |
| Logistics & e-commerce | Freight and surcharge by lane, weight band and service level; returns and restocking fees; versioned campaign pricing |
Technology
A mainstream stack, deliberately
No exotic dependencies and no vendor lock-in beyond SQL Server and — optionally — Anthropic.
- Runtime
- .NET 8 — ASP.NET Core, Razor Pages
- Persistence
- SQL Server via Entity Framework Core 8
- Identity
- ASP.NET Identity 8
- Expression engine
- NCalc-Edge 1.5
- C# compilation
- Roslyn (Microsoft.CodeAnalysis 4.8)
- Background jobs
- Hangfire 1.8, SQL storage
- Real-time UI
- SignalR
- Excel & PDF
- ClosedXML / OpenXml · QuestPDF
- Validation & resilience
- FluentValidation 11 · Polly 8
- Logging
- Serilog — console, file and MSSqlServer sinks
- AI
- Anthropic Claude (v1/messages)
Integration model
Two ways in, one engine
API-led
Host systems — policy admin, CRM, broker portal, IVR — call ValuNova's REST endpoints with an API key. ValuNova stays invisible to end users.
UI-led
Operators, configurators and bulk-processing teams work directly in ValuNova's own interface.
Both modes share the same engine, the same rate tables and the same audit trail.
Honest scope. ValuNova is not a BPM engine, not a policy administration system and not a BI tool. It holds no customer records — it computes numbers on demand, and produces results and audit data that your downstream systems consume.
Getting started
How an engagement runs
Discovery workshop
Map two or three of your current calculation pain-points onto ValuNova's field types and approval flow.
Pilot product
Pick one product line, port its calculation spec into ValuNova, and run parallel against the existing system for a month.
Integration spike
Expose one ValuNova calculation to one upstream system through the API.
AI evaluation
If a hosted LLM is acceptable, enable the test-case and formula generators for the pilot team and measure the productivity gain.
Production readiness
Operations runbook, backup and restore, capacity sizing, and SSO federation on top of the existing Identity layer.
See ValuNova run your numbers
We will take one of your real calculation specs into the platform and show you the version history, the frozen snapshot and the reproduced result.