Better BI: Guy Carpenter & Co.

Rather unpredictably, hail pounds U.S. crops and property to the tune of about US$1 billion in damage each year, according to the National Weather Service. These icy agents of chaos account for just one of many catastrophic scenarios that Guy Carpenter & Co. must simulate and model, if the company is to protect its policyholders and stay one step ahead of disasters.

As a major reinsurance firm, New York-based Guy Carpenter sells policies to other insurance companies. Most of Guy Carpenter's clients are looking for added protection from those disasters that are either difficult to predict or tend to be the most damaging.

It's risky business, indeed, and the company's strength depends on its ability to calculate not only its own risks, but also those facing its many clients. To best serve the array of parties involved and to make the best projections, Guy Carpenter has blended business intelligence and Web 2.0 technologies and layered the resulting application with advanced mapping capabilities.

At a Glance

A risk and reinsurance specialist with 50 offices worldwide, this firm has business expertise in areas such as aviation; construction and engineering; life, accident and health; marine; political risk and trade credit; professional liability; property; terrorism; and workers' compensation.

-- Project champion: Ryan Ogaard, global leader
-- Project cost and payback: Because the company provides the i-aXs service as a value-add for clients, it doesn't license it or quantify its return on investment.
-- Size of the IT group: About 25 people

"As a global reinsurance broker, our transactions must include services such as catastrophe modeling, portfolio management and exposure management. All of these services generate a voluminous amount of data that has geographic context," says Shajy Mathai, managing director.

To meet these challenges, Guy Carpenter has put in place a system dubbed i-aXs, which is infused with location intelligence and online risk management capabilities, among others. The system relies on MicroStrategy Inc.'s MicroStrategy 8 BI software. Mathai recalls trying many combinations before settling on the i-aXs approach. "We investigated products until we found a combination of a database, BI, mapping, and [extract, transform and load] capabilities that had sufficient compatibility from which we could start building a product," he says.

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