A retired Bermuda Monetary Authority executive is making waves in the tech world by developing software, named Ac28R, which writes software for you.

Gary Thomas, former BMA director of actuary, has produced something so amazing that Ac28R has been heralded in The Engineer magazine this month and in Mensa’s own newsletter last summer.

Mensa, for people with IQs in the 98th percentile, has 134,000 members, including Mr Thomas.

Today, he is a financial services consultant, the CEO of his company, Pure Sourcery, based in Bath, England.

“I am thrilled that my baby is finally seeing the light of day,” he said.

Ac28R is the first software to write complex and reliable software. It also uses a visual interface so that non-technical people can use it.

Mr Thomas explained that AI models such as ChatGPT can be great for generating pictures, summaries or analysis, but are not so good at creating software.

“There is no way you are ever going to be able to type in enough words to tell it how to calculate the value of some life insurance reserve or financial derivative,” Mr Thomas said. “It just cannot handle that.”

He said Ac28R is good for developing complicated software that is subject to change and must be precise.

“Financial software most meets that need,” Mr Thomas said. “Because of my background, the finance industry in Bermuda will probably be my initial focus.”

Originally, from England, he moved to the United States at age 22 to work as a computer programmer.

“I was always looking for flexible, efficient ways to do things,” he said. “I wanted to find more general ways to input information into a computer programme in a flexible way. I always liked to play with software.”

He switched career tracks to actuarial science and started working at the BMA in 2011.

His LinkedIn page says as deputy director, Mr Thomas led the life actuarial team in helping to develop an economic balance sheet and build out a robust risk-based capital framework for Bermuda's long-term reinsurance market.

He designed and developed the scenario-based approach for calculating reserves, a new technique closely aligned with how many companies price and evaluate risk and has enabled significant growth in reinsurance activity.

He served on International Association of Insurance Supervisors committees dedicated to the development of the international capital standard and to improved regulation of certain cross-border reinsurance arrangements.

Although he did not have as much time to work on his pet programming project, he continued to tinker with it on and off over the next 14 years.

When he retired and moved back to England, he had time to fully focus on Ac28R again.

“Now I have a full, working model,” he said. “It should be completed this summer.”

His challenge now is to raise awareness of Ac28R and make it commercially available.

“We are reaching out to people in technical areas,” he said. “There are a lot of people in tech that are paying close attention to AI that generates software. We are reaching out to people who are experts in that area, and we are hoping to engage with them. We would like to find some companies to experiment with it.”

He thought they were still a few months away from actual sales.

The hardest part about developing Ac28R was dealing with the high degree of complexity.

“I’m not just writing software, but teaching a computer how to write its own software based on different inputs,” the 65-year-old said. “I had to keep track of many moving parts. To do that, I had to have a dozen or so documents open, and I would be continually writing notes in them, updating them and fixing them as I went along.”