The data warehouse needed to be fed by multiple systems across the organisation. For the investment operations component, If's sophisticated portfolio management system - Wallstreet Suite - contained all the data required.

SkySparc's Professional Services team used the SkyREPORT business intelligence software to act as a data warehouse feeder, extracting detailed data on instruments, transactions and cash flow.

Data was extracted both raw and calculated using the business logic of Wallstreet Suite. SkyREPORT's flexibility made it much better suited to the data warehouse project than the alternative of hard-coded SQL integration.

"We were given high level requirements for risk data that would need to be extracted to risk data storage for analysis," says Anders Eriksson, system and process manager at If. "But the caveat was that it was a moving target. As the regulation is not yet adopted by EIOPA (European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority) we needed to maintain flexibility.

"There are lots of data extraction tools on the market," says Mr Eriksson. "But we needed more than just raw data that could only be examined after extraction. For our Solvency II project we needed to extract calculated risk figures, and have a transparent view of the data and underlying business logic of Wallstreet Suite. Using SkyREPORT in the project gave us this capability."

Thomas Bergqvist, partner, SkySparc, says: "SkySparc needed to remain agile during the deployment, as data requirements were changing regularly. Using SkyREPORT we helped If reuse the rich calculated historical data coverage within Wallstreet Suite well ahead of the regulatory deadline for Solvency II."