Relentless innovation pinpoints end users
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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With raw information becoming ever more freely available, old rivals continue to innovate furiously, as a raft of announcements over the last month demonstrates. New workflow solutions, niche market targeting and strategic acquisitions are all part of the armoury that the competing players deploy.

Workflow first of all. LexisNexis Risk Solutions has launched Insurance Enterprise View, an attempt to help insurers overcome the problems of ageing legacy systems that are expensive to maintain and, as often as not, won’t talk to each other. Offering a single, reconciled data source for billing, policy, claims and reinsurance systems, it’s designed to be implemented in stages in the hope of making the transition from older systems as trouble-free as possible.

Then there’s WestlawNext Folder Sharing from Thomson Reuters – also designed to overcome legacy communication problems, in the legal sector this time. Last year TR developed the capability for colleagues within the same organisation to share research folders; now it’s extended that to sharing across multiple organisations, such as corporate law departments and their counsel.

Staying in the corporate legal field, Thomson Reuters has also come up with an addition to its Accelus suite of governance, risk and compliance products (see LiveWire’s Penny Crossland on this) Designed to help law firms garner more mergers and acquisitions business, M&A In Practice offers them access to millions of documents on background and precedents, allowing them to see how previous deals succeeded or failed.

And Thomson Reuters is targeting a further legal niche with its news service for New York attorneys. Part of TR’s News & Insight suite, it combines news from Reuters with legal analysis and materials from Westlaw.

In the risk management field, LexisNexis Risk Solutions has launched a new collaborative venture with its customers to help the receivables management industry target its debtors better. The LexisNexis Phone Disposition Consortium database is designed to let users know in advance the status of the party they’re contacting, and to help them avoid annoying consumers by calling the wrong ones.

But another heavyweight is emerging to challenge the risk management information status quo. Credit information provider Equifax has entered a new alliance with predictive analytics specialist FICO, promising “game changing” new solutions to help United Kingdom banks, insurers and retailers lend more safely while complying with regulatory requirements.

Finally there’s Thomson Reuters’ continuing strategic acquisitions. Most recently they’ve gathered in financial crime and corruption prevention information specialist World-Check and Mastersaf, the tax and accounting solutions provider in the rapidly rising economy of Brazil.

If there’s one thing that pulls all these disparate developments together, it’s their total focus on end users. For intermediaries, simply keeping track of them all is probably the best value they can add.

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