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

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, 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

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

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

The agent portal is a tool that allows agents to access pre-defined insurance BI reports. The tool is a browser-based, zero-footprint tool, with no learning tool whatsoever. Agents just log in with their agent ID and password, choose a report from the given list and see the results. The portal is available from any Internet-connected device, including iPhones, iPads and Blackberries.

Insurance companies can use this tool to provide agents with information they need to serve existing clients and sell to prospects. Reports may include:

• Activity monitors
• Sales and growth analysis
• Renewal lists
• Cross selling lists

The full press release is available at http://www.insfocus.com/press/insurance-agent-portal.html.

For more information on the new agent portal, contact us at info@insfocus.com or visit InsFocus Systems website.

Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan@insfocus.com

Today we are happy to announce that we were recertified as a Microsoft Partner – Independent Software Solution competency.

We have been a Microsoft provider since 2004, and a certified partner since 2006. Microsoft has now changed its partner certifications, and partners are now asked to carry on even more detailed testing of the applications, and again submit customer references. Having our main product, InsFocus BI, pass those tests, and having submitted the customer references, has again earned us the partner credentials.

You can read the full press release here - http://www.insfocus.com/press/microsoftpartner.html.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

Today we released InsFocus BI version 1.93.

The new release has a set of important improvements, many of them came as direct feedback from our clients. We put a lot of effort into making our insurance-specific data model and business intelligence platform stronger and more flexible.

IF function in calculated items

Creating calculated items in InsFocus has been greatly enhanced by the ability to use logical expressions and the IF function. The new calculated items edit form now looks like this:

Filter by tab

The filter mechanism is now much more sophisticated while used with tabs. When defining a filter on a report with tabs, we get the following dialog:

This allows:

• Applying the same filter on all tabs.
• Applying the filter only on the selected tab.
• Applying the filter on the selected tab, and then filtering all other tabs by the rows filtered in the selected tab.

Distribution column

A distribution column can now be added with a single click to a report:

Flexible “last” period definition

When setting report time periods, the system enables defining different ending dates as seen in the example below.

If today’s valid date is 15^th December, 2010:

• Year to date – 1/1/2010 – 15/12/2010
• Year to Quarter – 1/1/2010 – 30/9/2010
• Year to Month – 1/1/2010 – 30/11/2010
• Full Year – 1/1/2009 – 31/12/2009

Valid date – time base relationships

The notion of “valid date” in the system used to mean accounting date. We filtered every report by this valid date, allowing time rollback, and not displaying “future” inception policies by default.

This was not very suitable for “operation” time base, in which tracking is of daily actions – sales, claims opened, etc. In this time base, people wanted to see all data, including “future” data – when measuring agent sales, it is not very important if the policies sold have gone into the accounting books or not.

In the new version, the meaning of the “valid” date changes by time base; thus operational reports show all activity by default. When doing time rollback on operational reports, data will show up to the operation date chosen, and not accounting date chosen. This will simplify report definition and make it more intuitive to users.

New renewal items

• One of the greatest features of the system is the ability to dynamically measure renewals and lapses. We made this even better in this version by adding more items to the generic model and tweaking the current items. Renewal items now include:
• Policies up for renewal up to report’s valid date
• Policies for renewal for the whole report period (even after valid date)
• Lapses, renewals, lapse %, renewals %.
• Annualized premiums for renewal, renewed.
• Annualized premium renewal difference (of renewed policies).
• Annualized premium lapsed.
• Sums insured for renewal, renewed.
• Sums insured renewal difference (of renewed policies).

The system can now generate reports measuring renewal and lapse ratios, can generate list reports of policies for renewal and policies renewed and can compare premiums and rates changes at renewal.

Other changes

• Optimization in the query mechanism makes running long list reports a lot faster.
• Empty reports can be excluded from report schedule, so user will get alerts only when a report has data (e.g. send me daily all claims above X).
• Valid date in time periods header (@) is now optional.

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

The basics of insurance business profitability

Competition - Insurance companies in almost every market in the world face strong internal competition. The reason for such competition is in the insurance products themselves which are hard to differentiate. From the end customer’s point of view a motor policy is a motor policy, so insurance companies’ can only gain market share by price competition. In a free tariff market this can drive insurers’ prices down to uneconomical levels, eating into their capital and reserves and undermining their financial stability.

Segmentation - An insurance company’s portfolio is made up of a large number of segments, and can each have different levels of profitability. These segments can be defined by product, distribution channel, individual agent or intermediary, geographical location, characteristic of the insured personality or characteristic of the insured object. While the business in some segments can be positive, the business in other segments can be negative or even very negative, offsetting the gains from the positive segments.

Fluctuations - Profitability of insurance business is largely a result of claims experience which is a stochastic process. Thus an agent’s portfolio which may be negative one year can be positive the next year, all due to fluctuation in claims. Thus to determine an insurance portfolio’s profitability, measurements have to be taken over a large data sample or over a longer period of time.

Time delay - An insurance policy is usually issued for one year. A claim can happen any time during the policy’s coverage period, even on the last day of the policy. Claim reporting is not always on time, and handling also takes time, in extreme cases finalization of a claim can be years after notification. This process makes measuring profitability quite complex, as claims paid in a specific month can relate to different polices issued many months or even years before.

Claims reserves – Due to the above time delays, insurance companies are required to hold in their financial accounts reserves for future liabilities. These reserves are made of:

• Estimates for the cost of claims which have been notified and not yet settled. These are usually done on claim by claim basis.
• Estimations for claims which probably occurred but have not yet been notified (so called IBNR – Incurred But Not Reported). These estimates are done on overall portfolio basis.

If claims reserves are too low, claims paid in the future will create a deficit in the company’s results, whereas if they are too high they will create a surplus.

Cost ratios – Other than claims, insurance companies also have other costs. Broadly speaking they are divided into two:

• Acquisition costs - Agent commissions and other costs directly associated with obtaining insurance business.
• Administration costs – Costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of the insurance company’s operation.

Both type of costs need to be controlled, mainly in relation to the company’s volume of premium income.

Premium income – Last but not least, premium income is where it all begins. Insurance companies need to maintain a reasonably sized portfolio to be able to support costs and minimize fluctuation effects. To maintain premium volume companies need to acquire new business as well as not lose the business they already have.

What does an insurance company need to monitor to control the above factors?

An insurance business intelligence software must enable the following capabilities to support the necessary business analytics;

Monitor KPI’s - Insurers need to monitor their key performance indicators (KPI’s) in different views. The main KPI’s for insurance companies are:

• Loss ratio – the ratio of incurred claims (paid +outstanding) to earned premiums (premiums less unearned premium reserve).
• Loss frequency – the ratio between number of claims to number of exposed policies.
• Cost ratio – the ratio of agent commissions and company expenses to premium.

The company should be able to monitor KPI’s by all segments as defined above taking into consideration catastrophe costs which should be separated from premiums for the calculations.

It should be able to see these KPI’s on financial year basis or underwriting year basis, to detect any negative trends in the KPI’s and take corrective actions.

The same information when viewed by product rating factors should be used to indicate to the company any changes that need to be introduced into their pricing structure. Separating loss ratios and loss frequencies for each product by type of claim is also a useful tool for pricing calculations.

Control claims – A company should have reports showing claims trends by type of claim, to be able to spot as early as possible any changes in claims behavior.

Payments to claim service providers such as motor repair shops or hospitals and clinics, should be monitored on regular basis by claims department and costs should be compared between providers.

Claim payment information should be captured before and after deductibles (excess) so that the company can use this information to evaluate what would be the effect of changes to deductibles.

Reserves control – An insurer should control claims reserves by being able to see the relationship between reserves posted and ultimate settlements made (run-off). Such reports should be available both on global basis as well as on claim itemized basis.

Sales and Marketing – Insurers should obviously have reports for premiums in comparison to previous periods or to sales targets, however in addition they need to check two other measurements – new sales (separate from renewals), and renewal / lapse ratios – the rate of policies coming up for renewal that have been actually renewed.

Financial pro-forma reports on ongoing basis – Financial reports are compiled by insurers on quarterly basis. During the course of the quarter the captains of the company have little indication of where these are headed, and are unaware of any corrective action that needs to be taken. Reporting systems should be able to provide insurers with a daily report showing pro-forma profit and loss statement at the end of day compared with same day previous period. Such reports should be available both on Gross (before reinsurance) and on Net (after reinsurance) basis.

Conclusion

An insurer having the reporting and analysis tools described above, should be able to control profitability, better calculate pricing, verify that reserves are sufficient, sales performance and business retention are in place and ultimately improve profitability.

Learn more about InsFocus BI insurance software.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com

We have just released a new marketing document named The InsFocus Advantage for Insurance Companies. This document summarizes what makes InsFocus' insurance software a unique business intelligence solution for insurance companies.

The document’s contents are:

• Company background and history
• Insurance-specific functionality
• Insurance content
• Reporting and analysis infrastructure
• User interface features
• Implementation methodology

I hope you find the document interesting and helpful. For more information, contact us or write us an e-mail to info@insfocus.com.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems
utaiber@insfocus.com