iDEA stands for iLumen Data Exchange Architecture.

"Because of economic uncertainty and market instability, commercial lenders and portfolio managers must improve data management and risk analytics to improve their ability to respond quickly to market change," said Patricia Hines, Research Director for Wholesale Banking at TowerGroup. "TowerGroup recommends banks take prompt and focused action to strengthen their data and analytics infrastructure to improve credit decisions, identify weakening credit quality, and achieve best practices in credit risk management."

"iDEA was developed in response to leading banks' need to consolidate customer data into a real-time desktop view for both credit risk managers and relationship managers," said Loren Eckart, EVP of Product Marketing at iLumen. "Banks create a real competitive advantage when they speed the flow of customer information and analytics into the hands of decision makers, relationship managers, and customers. By powering existing reports and workflow on the iDEA platform, our customers have reduced manual processes and redundant data entry for certain commercial report processes by orders of magnitude. For example, preparation of a specific comparative analysis report was reduced to less than 15 minutes per customer from 8 hours per customer."

In addition to providing a centralized platform to power legacy applications, iDEA also powers iLumen's end-user applications; Portfolio Connection and Customer Connection. Portfolio Connection provides portfolio views, analytics, reporting and data mining on the desktop of every banker. Customer Connection enables a self-serve customer web-portal for real-time credit monitoring and automated data collection.