JRules-Based System Empowers Frontline Employees To Make Sophisticated Product Recommendations

SEOUL – May 11, 2004 - ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading provider of enterprise-class software components and services, today announced that South Korea’s premier financial institution, Industrial Bank of Korea (IBK), has selected ILOG JRules™, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS), to empower bank tellers, loan officers and other users to provide real-time product and service recommendations through the country’s recently introduced “Bancassurance” System. bancassurance, which was introduced via legislation to the South Korean financial market in 2003, allows traditional banks to recommend and cross-sell insurance products to consumers.

Selling insurance products poses significant barriers to entry for commercial banks, in part because the new offerings create highly complex combinations of financial and investment products, including life insurance, pension plans, travelers and fire policies and asset integration plans. Additionally, training and supporting the banking staff that have day to day contact with customers to make accurate and compelling recommendations also poses a significant challenge. Due to this increased complexity, Industrial Bank of Korea selected ILOG JRules to help automate and streamline the business processes that drive its Bancassurance business.

Using ILOG JRules, the new system enables non-technical customer service bank employees to query customers using a series of questions that are mapped to proprietary business rules. The system then in turn produces automatically generated product and service recommendations. Furthermore, JRules reduces IT maintenance costs by providing business users with the ability to easily understand and edit business rules, alleviating the need to engage technical administrators.

“The opportunity to provide a full array of financial and investment products to our customers demanded that we automate business processes in order to reduce the need to re-train frontline employees,” said Im-Su Lee, general manager, Bancassurance, Industrial Bank of Korea. “ILOG’s BRMS enabled us to introduce and maintain our Bancassurance System’s complex offerings, and has given our frontline employees, including bank tellers and loan officers, access to real-time product and services information, helping us to meet our goal of providing the highest customer service.”

IBK introduced its Bancassurance System with 32 insurance products in co-operation with six life and four non-life insurance companies, including industry leaders Samsung Life Insurance, Kyobo Life Insurance, Daehan Life Insurance, Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance and Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance.

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry’s leading business rule software which provides a competitive advantage for many strategic business applications. For example, compliance solutions powered by ILOG monitor high volumes of data in real time, enabling the immediate detection and reporting of faulty or fraudulent information. For business process management, ILOG’s BRMS enables the effective management of the complex, dynamic rules that can number in the thousands for a discrete business process, maximizing business agility. Customers of the award-winning ILOG JRules include CitiStreet, eBay, Zurich, MetLife, Sabre and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide.

About ILOG
For more than 10 years, ILOG's innovative enterprise-class software components and services have helped companies maximize their business agility and improve operating efficiency. Over 1000 global corporations and more than 300 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's business rules, optimization and visualization technologies to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. For more details, please visit www.ilog.com

ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark of ILOG. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.