Insurance Technology summit January 24, 2012 Mumbai
InsFocus will kick-off 2012 events in the 3rd Insurance Technology summit that will be held in Mumbai, India on the 24th of January at the Grand Hyatt. The summit is in association with the National Insurance Academy of India and focuses on new computing paradigms that insurance companies can leverage for growth, competitiveness and efficiency.
InsFocus will be represented by CEO Mr. Uri Taiber and local Head of Business Development Mr. Mitesh Matani.
During the summit, Mr. Taiber is scheduled to give an inspiring speech on the added value of expert BI systems to insurance companies profitability.
Mr. Taiber is a veteran insurance expert, as the General Manager of Zion Insurance Company, one of Israel's first insurance companies (founded 1935) and holds an MBA degree from IMEDE Switzerland and a B.Sc. degree in computer engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.
Insurance Technology 3rd Annual Summit 2012
Contact us today for more information on upcoming events.
Yaron Gabriel,
International Sales Director
New YouTube Channel
Hi,
The InsFocus YouTube channel is live at http://www.youtube.com/insfocus.
The first video is a demonstration of a profitability report:
Hanan Taiber
CTO
Bituach Haklai implemented InsFocus BI!
Today we are happy to announce that implementation of our system in Bituach Haklai Insurance was completed.
Bituach Haklai, one of Israel’s oldest insurance companies, has approached us about a year ago with a need to replace their BI system. We have started a project under tight schedule, and completed both policies and claims in less than 6 months.
After this period, we set up reports, trained users and added more content according to their demands. The system is now already in heavy use by executives in different levels in the company, providing meaningful insight into their data.
You can read more in the official press release.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com
TDWI Recommends Self-Service BI
In their latest quarterly best practices report, TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) presented a comprehensive survey which highlights the need for self-service BI in organizations.
Quoting some of the key sentences:
- “…enable BI users to become more self-reliant and less dependent on the IT organization”
- “…78% of respondents stated that they needed a faster time to value from BI solutions”
- “…companies are looking for alternative approaches to BI”
- “One approach is to set up an environment in which the information workers can create and access specific sets of BI reports, queries, and analytics themselves—without IT intervention”
- “Support for such sophisticated analyses, as well as making results easy to publish in the required format, greatly improves the productivity of a company’s information workers.”
InsFocus has been built from day one to be an insurance professional’s self-service BI. InsFocus’ clients are insurance company professionals, mostly business users creating their own reports and analysis and deriving real business value from the system’s built-in insurance analytics.
Read the complete TDWI report at http://tdwi.org/research/2011/07/best-practices-report-q3-self-service-business-intelligence/asset.aspx?tc=assetpg or learn more about InsFocus’ self-service BI capabilities.
Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com
Version 1.94 Announced
We are happy to announce the release of a new version of InsFocus BI, version 1.94. The new version will be shipped in July 2011, and will further enhance the analytics and reporting abilities of our business intelligence solution. With version 1.94 InsFocus reasserts its position as a leading analysis and reporting engine for the insurance industry.
User levels
In this version, we introduce a new concept named User levels. This feature broadens the reach of InsFocus and allows the company to define different access levels to different users. There are now three user levels in the system:
- Full Users – Those are the power users in the company, professionals who create reports, change report definitions, save reports in public or private libraries and perform advanced analytics.
- View Users – These users can only open reports from the public library and view their real-time results. This level of users may be appropriate for the mass of business users whom the company does not wish to provide with report editing functionalities.
- Schedule Recipients – These are users that can only receive scheduled reports by email. They cannot connect to the system and do not have it installed. This level is suitable to staff users or agents for whom the company wants to provide pre-defined content on a “push” basis.
User role definitions can be further controlled using the system’s existing Roles definition mechanism.
Report scheduling enhancements
The report schedule mechanism has been greatly enhanced with new features;
- Multiple users – Power users having the required privileges can schedule the same report to many users. Each user will receive the report that is run under its own credentials. Thus a power user can create one report template for mailing to branch managers and each recipient will see the report showing their information.
- Recovery after ETL finishes – Users might schedule reports to run at times when an ETL process is running. In this case the reports are kept pending and once the ETL process finishes, those reports are run and sent to the user.
- Report schedule editing – Users can edit report schedule definitions including altering run times, recipients and notes.
Reporting in different currency
InsFocus has sophisticated multi-currency support. Each transaction is kept in the data warehouse in the company’s base currency, allowing for uniform reporting, while keeping the option of conversion to the original transaction currency.
We now added a feature that enables reporting in a different currency using any pre-defined currency conversion scheme. This is very helpful where the company needs to report in different currencies than its base currency, such as reporting to reinsurers in US Dollars. Conversion can be defined based on daily rate, end of month , mid quarter, or any other rate of exchange required.
Revamped system center users management
For version 1.94 we introduce a revamped users management screen in the system center.
This new screen adds users’ management capabilities for better and easier administration:
- Filter row allows filtering on all columns for long user lists
- Sorting by each users’ properties
- Batch updating of users properties
- Duplicate button for creating a user similar to another
- Last access column helps quickly identify inactive users
- Administrators now have the ability to choose “User must change password at next login”
Other improvements
1.94 contains many more useful features, amongst them:
- Risk codes selective syncing – This feature is useful in cases where risk codes contain very long value lists (for example, there can be thousands of car models). To enable easy filtering on those risk codes, users can now use an auto-complete box to select values.
- Half-year triangulation – Triangulation is an advanced actuarial calculation unique to InsFocus. It allows comparing one time axis to another in order to compose development statistics and extrapolate data using Chain-Ladder statistics. This feature has now been improved to enable analysis of non-symmetric time axes (e.g. accident years vs. development quarters) and to create analysis based on half-yearly development periods (in addition to years, quarters, months).
- Invert time axis order – A new control that allows setting time axes display order – from recent to past or the other way around.
- Notes in Excel connector – Dynamic data received in Excel connector can now include report header and notes.
- Dynamic CSV export – This new feature requested by insurers may be useful for automatic processes that need to receive data from InsFocus. Using this mechanism, any SOA enabled application can query InsFocus BI and receive back report results in CSV (in addition to HTML that was available before).
- Valid date in title bar – In order to enhance visibility of report’s valid date, it is now embedded in the report title bar.
- Repeat N periods – InsFocus’ time definitions mechanism is very flexible and allows defining any report period, and repeating this period back N years, quarters, etc. The new version adds the ability to repeat N periods as defined, meaning you can dynamically define a report, for example, for 4 months, then the previous 4 months and so on.
For further inquiries on the new version and its new features, visit www.insfocus.com or contact us at info@insfocus.com.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com