CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

Ameriprise Financial
A lifetime of investment decisions
Each of us is unique – even financially. Because of this, the best and most marketable long-term “lifetime” financial plans address more than taxes and ROI – they include factors such as personal risk tolerance, investment goals and taxes. Because of this, and more, Ameriprise Financial (www.ameriprise.com) has selected ILOG CPLEX, the leading mathematical programming software, to help customers overcome the complexity of lifetime financial planning.

Formerly American Express Financial Advisors, Ameriprise Financial is one of the leading financial planning, asset management and insurance companies in the United States. The company uses ILOG CPLEX in the new Lifetime Optimizer financial planning solution to enable more than 10,000 financial advisers to create and propose dynamic investment strategies that address the complex, interdependent financial choices faced by customers.

ILOG CPLEX is the most widely deployed optimization software in the world, with more than 100 of the Global 500 as customers. Financial services use it to create, manage and rebalance portfolios to meet customers' investment goals.

According to Bill Elliott, vice president and general manager of financial advice at Ameriprise Financial: “The Ameriprise Financial Lifetime Optimizer quickly and accurately formulates a complete investment strategy that recommends where clients’ existing assets should be held, saved, spent and invested over a period of time.”

Tavant’s Lending Life Cycle Management application enables mortgage companies to dramatically shorten the entire loan process using ILOG JRules, the market’s leading business rule management system (BRMS).

Tavant has streamlined the retail and wholesale loan-clearing process applied by mortgagers. Although every loan application must pass through a series of routine compliance checks, special attention is given to delivering the right product to each customer. Tavant enables their clients to combine the cost-saving benefits of automation with the customer-retaining work possible only with customization.

The Tavant application uses ILOG’s BRMS to fully automate the process for underwriting and approving loans. The BRMS also centralizes the business rules that comprise the solution’s decision logic, making them easier to update and share across the enterprise. Fully automated, a mortgage company’s loan process greatly increases efficiency for a significantly shorter average clearing time, and frees underwriters to concentrate on exceptional cases.

“ILOG JRules allows us to offer our customers the best possible solutions for their loan processing needs,” says Srinivas Narayanan, senior architect at Tavant. “ILOG JRules lets us create custom rule management solutions that shorten cycle times and eliminate errors.”

SMABTP
Offering builders better insurance
The regulations governing the construction industry are constantly being changed to accommodate new standards, practices and building materials. To keep up, the industry’s insurers must continuously update their processes to deliver the right coverage at a competitive price.

SMABTP (www.smabtp.fr) relies on ILOG JRules to stay in sync with the industry. France’s leading provider of construction insurance uses the top business rule management system (BRMS) to externalize application decision logic to make it easier to access and maintain.

Policies are expressed with business rules that are stored in a central repository. New regulations are implemented through the rules in the repository, which is shared by SMABTP’s underwriting applications. This fundamental shift in programming makes decision logic easier to modify. Business analysts can directly update the rules in the repository to deploy new policies much faster.

“Introducing new underwriting rules was a complex process which required three to four months to be implemented versus two weeks now,” says Jean-Michel Detavernier, director of IT projects and developments at SMABTP. “We dramatically enhanced the responsiveness and the flexibility of our underwriting applications, which means better servicing our customers and partners.

“We are also able to support compliance requirements in the underwriting process by enabling underwriters to audit and control the rules,” Mr. Detavernier adds. “As a matter of fact, one of the key drivers for adopting JRules was improving collaboration between IT and business users and productivity gains. We feel we’ve met these objectives.”

Cost-effectively building homes takes close coordination between builders and suppliers. W2G, a specialist in construction software in Australia, has created a comprehensive planning and scheduling system for managing homebuilding. Called Integra, the application models an entire construction project and fully automates its scheduling to better coordinate activities and reduce the impact of delays.

Integra uses ILOG Gantt for .NET to chart and schedule every facet of the complex building process. Accurate, comprehensive visualization has proven able to keep building projects on track. If a delay occurs, ILOG Gantt for .NET shows the interdependencies of all the construction activities, enabling the builder to easily determine which activities to reschedule in response to the delay.

Integra already saves Impact Homes, W2G’s sister construction company, about four weeks and A$5,000 (about US$3,800) in administrative time and costs per home. The company has doubled the number of houses it builds without a similar increase in personnel.

“ILOG Gantt for .NET allowed us to focus on the functionality rather than the framework,” says Paul Usher, development manager at W2G. “Without it, the cost to produce the charting module would have been prohibitive and we’d still be writing it. It’s an absolutely awesome product!”