Cap Gemini SA, the French IT services firm, is fronting a consortium that hopes to cash in on the UK’s increasingly competitive insurance market with customer relationship management software. Cap Gemini will provide the consultancy, Sun and Oracle the servers, data warehousing and data extraction loading and transfer with a small British firm, Ki Q, the pattern recognition technology to predict customer trends in policy application. The software is called Omega+.
With government pressure to offer cheaper pensions to replace state welfare, and new entrants such as supermarkets to the traditional insurance world, the sector’s margins are suffering. Omega+ uses genetic algorithms from Ki Q to make predictions based on rules entered by the user which find patterns in the company’s past policy records. Lee Brooke-Pearce, a business consultant with Cap Gemini’s insurance sector, says that the contracts will be in the $1.2m to $6.4m range.
