Information Builders Develops BI Tool For The Insurance Industry

Information Builders Inc. is expanding its business-intelligence technology into vertical industries. This week the company unveiled a packaged business-intelligence system designed for the insurance industry and revealed a partnership with systems integrator BearingPoint Inc. to help deploy the software.

IBI said the new Information Builders Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF) package, based on the vendor's WebFocus reporting software, is the first in a series of industry-specific business-intelligence applications the company plans to introduce this year. Software for financial-services companies and state and local government are also in the works.

IRF targets property and casualty insurance companies, providing them with reporting capabilities that help them manage their business performance. The tool specifically offers risk and policy-rate management, claims reporting, regulatory compliance and governance, and underwriting-profitability-analysis capabilities.

The new package includes an insurance-industry data model, a data transformation and loading tool for updating the software's database, a set of insurance industry-specific report frameworks, industry key performance metrics, and a dashboard user interface.

IBI says the system's capabilities are based on BearingPoint's expertise in the insurance industry and technology IBI has developed itself in insurance-company engagements. The software has been implemented by a few insurance companies, including ING Canada, and will be generally available in June.

IBI debuted IRF at its Summit user conference in Las Vegas. The company also began shipping the previously announced WebFocus 7 this week. And it unveiled iWay Adaptive Framework for SOA, an enhanced release of the iWay adaptor set that includes a design-time toolkit, a run-time engine built on an open-transport service bus architecture, and a business-to-business component called Trading Manager--all to help businesses manage IT systems based on services-oriented architectures.