ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: WINS
April 2005 Project of the Month: WINS
Web-based Intelligence for common-interest fiscal Networked Services
Business Intelligence (BI) is the “interactive process of analysing and exploring information to discern trends or patterns, thereby deriving insights and drawing conclusions”.
WINS will deliver a web-based Business Intelligence Service containing new financial knowledge on companies from information gathered through interoperable information services.
Issues being addressed
The two main issues being addressed by WINS are:
- Need for Public Financial Institutions such as Finance Ministries to acquire Business Intelligence to assist in definition of financial policy. This will be done by analysing the financial situation in various economic sectors, including support for identification of tax evasion and the underground economy.
- Need of Private Financial Institutions to acquire data, following the adoption of the recent Basel Capital Accord (Basel-II), which is governed by the Bank for International Settlements. This Accord establishes standards for capital adequacy and credit risk for banks worldwide.
Goals of the project
- To validate a web-based Business Intelligence service for gathering, managing, and analysing information, to assist the financial sector in assessment of financial policy, financial monitoring, and decision making support for credit risk management
- To increase the capability of the European Financial System to provide private business, especially SMEs, with access to risk capital
- To bridge the gap between the world of Business Intelligence as software solutions (Business Objects, Microstrategy, Oracle, Microsoft) and the world of Business Information Providers (rating agencies and other financial intelligence providers – such as Moody’s, Reuters, LexisNexis, etc)
- To fulfil the requirements of Internal Rating Based (IRB) approaches that take into account an array of extended risk factors and encompass sophisticated models.
Expected results
- Analysis of costs of full deployment, necessary management structure, investments needed, validated approach to market, verified pricing mechanisms, breakeven analysis
- Removal of barriers to full deployment of the WINS services
Technical perspective
- Information gathering – to extract data from different repositories, which are based on a variety of platforms, and store heterogeneous data.
- Knowledge Discovery – unstructured data is searched for by patterns identifying bits of structured information of the required type using innovative text analysis tools, and advanced language technology so that even complex facts can be extracted and represented in compact form.
- Data Filtering / Normalization – heterogeneous data from different providers is normalized and stored according to a pre-defined structure. Mapping partly based on semantic information from ontologies which must support knowledge extraction and normalization (linguistic, lexical).
- Business Intelligence - responsible for execution of XML/A queries by using normalized structure. Interface to outside world consists of a Web Service interface offering the XML/A standard API.
Trans-European coverage
The WINS partnership involves entities from Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, together with the direct involvement of all the European Business Registers and the Institutions they operate on behalf of.
Furthermore, WINS includes the full range of stakeholders, ranging from technology companies, service providers and deployers, to customers and users.
Target users
Public Financial Institutions (such as Ministries of Finance). WINS will provide trustworthy, timely and comprehensive pool of company data to feed decision support systems for financial policies.
Private Financial Institutions (such as Banks). WINS will provide trustworthy, timely and comprehensive pool of risk data to feed Basel-II-compliant risk measurement models.
Specialised Agencies that offer financial services. WINS will provide trustworthy, timely and comprehensive pool of risk data to produce company ratings, scoring, financial studies (e.g., asset and liability), and other high level business analyses.
Information Providers (such as the European Business Registers). Information that is acquired from external information providers will be filtered and analysed by WINS (data-mined, knowledge-extracted, correlated with other data etc.) to provide structured data.
Achievements
WINS has defined and has started validating a number of service lines:
| Service Line | WINS Service | Targets |
| Business Intelligence Services | Fiscal analysis and monitoring | Public Institutions, Finance Ministries |
| Statistical fiscal data | Associations, Researchers | |
| Basel-II Business Intelligence | Financial Institutions, Banks | |
| SME ratings | Associations, SMEs | |
| Self Assessment for SMEs | Self-assessment for access to credit purposes | Associations, SMEs |
| Self-assessment for internationalisation purposes | Internationalisation service providers for SMEs | |
| Company Information Services | Company Information report | Credit Reporting Agencies and Data Providers |
A comprehensive Market Analysis has been carried out, target users have been identified and a selection of them involved in the validation process. Success criteria have been defined. A preliminary financial analysis for each service line has been carried out, estimating revenues, costs and cash flow.
Reference Data
Web site: www.winsproject.com ;
www.winsintelligence.com
Project Reference: eTEN-C510836
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start date: 01-05-2004
Duration: 18 months
End Date: 31-10-2005