The Hindu Business Line : i-flex sets up Castek competency centre

i-flex Solutions Ltd has set up a Castek competency centre in Bangalore to provide IT solutions to the global property and casualty insurance industry.

i-flex had forayed into the insurance space by picking up around 73 per cent stake in Canadian firm Castek Software Inc. Castek provides insurance companies with a suite of core business processing systems for product and process configuration, policy processing, customer billing, claims management and services in the property and casualty space.

Mr V. Shankar, Executive Vice-President, PrimeSourcing, i-flex Solutions, said the company, apart from building domain specific skill sets, would also showcase the solutions around Castek's insurance product Insure3 (cubed) through the Bangalore competency centre. i-flex plans to have around 100 people at the Castek competency centre.

i-flex is currently implementing Castek's solution for Tokio Marine Management Inc (TMM) across its offices in the US. i-flex had bagged a three-year deal from TMM to replace its legacy commercial lines policy processing platform.

"We currently have about 90 people working on the TMM account implementing the solution," he said.

Mr Shankar said the global property and casualty insurance market was very huge and the company was exploring the possibilities of tapping the market in countries such as South Korea and South Africa among others.

Revenues from the insurance space are very small for i-flex at present with Castek contributing about Rs 63 lakh for the year-ended March 2006.

i-flex posted a net profit of Rs 247.3 crore on revenues of Rs 1,482.3 crore for the year-ended March 2006, a year-on-year growth of 35 per cent and 31 per cent respectively.

Products business accounted for 51 per cent of the revenues, while the remaining 49 per cent came from the services.