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Why is InsFocus BI better suited for insurance companies’ analysis and reporting needs?

Last week Hanan has published a blog post in CIO.com regarding our experiences with BI (business intelligence) in insurance, and what makes reporting and analysis different for this vertical. You can read the original blog post Here. In this post I will explain why we believe InsFocus BI is better suited to this job.

When we set out to build InsFocus a few years ago, we found there is a fundamental shortcoming in the way reporting and analysis is done in insurance companies. The main problem was that there was a clear separation between the tool and the model. Thus, a company would go into a process of choosing a tool that looked fit for the purpose (usually Cognos or BO). As a second phase, the company will hire professionals or use in-force persons to build the data model and the ETL processes.

The outcome, in many companies’ view, is disappointing. The tool, that had looked very nice on “demo” data (which is usually simple retail data), suddenly looks rigid and not flexible enough. The model, that is developed by BI professionals, misses the sophistication of insurance. Then, the company goes into endless cycles of data model improvements and enhancements.

So why do we believe that InsFocus BI is better? For a few reasons.

1. Built-in data model – InsFocus BI ships with a comprehensive insurance data model, covering most insurance aspects available. The model includes earned and unearned premiums, deferred acquisition costs, outstanding claims, IBNR calculations, and a lot more. So basically, we know the end result before even starting. This alone saves tons of executive time, BI developer time and saves the company from making a lot of mistakes.
2. A tool that is built for insurance – InsFocus BI is not just a shallow data model, but a sophisticated tool that is built specifically for insurance. So, unique insurance techniques, such as changing calculations according to the presented time base (e.g. underwriting, accounting), showing triangulation views, calculating run-off using claim filters, finding the sums insured at a specific snapshot date, and many many more, are already built into the tool.
3. Granular reporting and advanced filtering – a unique characteristic of insurance reporting is the figures distortion that can be caused by a single event – one big claim can distort an agent’s full record if looking only at top-level averages. To support insurance analysis, InsFocus BI provides two important capabilities:
   1. Drill-down to any level – not just fixed drill-down. With InsFocus BI, you can drill-down to any level, including client, policy, claim and even the individual policy and claim transactions.
   2. Pre-filters – InsFocus BI allows easy creation of pre-query filter on the measurements themselves, enabling analysis such as “show me profitability ignoring claims above X” or “show me a list of the top biggest claims in the last 1 year”.
4. Ad-hoc reporting – generic solutions have traditionally split users into two superficial types. One type is the so-called “simple user”, who presumably is not computer literate and only wants to see ready-made reports. The second type is the “power user”, who wants to do slicing-and-dicing and maybe alter some reports. In InsFocus, we decided we won’t do not agree with this distinction, and we enabled ad-hoc querying for all users.
   This is especially useful as insurance information workers need ad-hoc querying, and a lot. New reporting needs arise almost daily – and going to the IT department for every new report is a huge waste of time and resources. Using InsFocus BI, we enabled all information workers to perform their own analysis using a very simple to use interface.

We will continue to improve InsFocus BI, and we are very dedicated to the insurance business.

Uri Taiber
CEO, InsFocus Systems

utaiber@insfocus.com