Hewlett-Packard Ltd and Basingstoke-based Financial Solutions Ltd, have jointly developed an integrated broking system for the London insurance market which will be available from October. The new system is called IBEX, Insurance Broking by Electronic Exchange, and it runs under Unix on single, networked, or clustered Hewlett-Packard RISC-based HP9000 Series 800 machines. IBEX offers electronic data exchange via market networks such as Limnet, The London Insurance Market Network, and Rinet, the European Re-Insurance Network, and it will support any future networks. It uses Oracle’s database management system, and is integrated with Financial Solutions’ Crown multi-currency ledger and cash management pakage. IBEX has a number of facilities including one-time entry, cash management, investment monitoring, policy accounting, claims processing, enquiry and reporting, and automatic production of policy documents. The two companies say that the system was developed over the past two years in response to the needs of the financial market for open networking and open systems. They believe that the 1990s will see the Lloyd’s market undergo its own equivalent of the Big Bang, and networking is going to be crucial to a company’s success. This is a view endorsed by the market operator, Lloyd’s, which has insisted that its members participate in Limnet, and there are now rules defining a common format for the content of market transmissions, and the Edifact protocol for electronic transmissions between dissimilar hardware. The cost of IBEX will depend on existing hardware and the number of modules required, but entry cost is around UKP60,000 and the average sale is expected to be between UKP150,000 and UKP170,000. Both Hewlett-Packard and Financial Systems Ltd expect to sell the product on the continent, and it is available in French and German versions.
