BlackPearl launches predictive analytics

Predictive analytics, still the domain of a few giant vendors such as SAS Institute and SPSS, is also finding support with smaller niche vendors such as BlackPearl, who announced this week BlackPearl B4 for the financial services industry.

The three major components at the heart of the B4 middleware is a new integration engine, scenario modeling capability, and intelligent agents that seek out market opportunities.

“Our goal is not to introduce another big piece of software. Rather we have a knowledge broker platform with the financial services applications on top,” said Michael Brill, vice president of products at BlackPearl.

B4 integrates information systems, and a set of decision systems monitors and analyzes data and business events according to a set of best practice analytic models to determine if there is an opportunity or a risk for a customer’s client.

Although small in relative terms to SAS or SPSS, BlackPearl has some of the largest financial services customers including Deutsche Bank, All State, and HSBC.

One industry analyst said that smaller companies in the predictive analytics space are growing by offering unique domain knowledge that some of the larger vendors do not have.

“HNC [acquired by Fair Isaac] has built quite a business with credit card issuing banks because they had software that monitors the time between when the card gets scanned to when it gets approval. It checks whether or not the purchase fits into the pattern. If it is too far out of bounds it raises a flag. And for that people would go to a specialty provider,” said Michael Berry, principal at Data Miners.

BlackPearl’s domain knowledge in wealth and portfolio management is being used to create templates to solve specific business problems, according to Brill.

“We have a component for retail brokers that alerts them whenever their client who held a municipal bond is moving from one state to another. It alerts them of the tax consequences and recommends a compensatory transaction,” Brill said.

The integration component connects to relational databases, Web services, and message queues and abstracts that data into one model that can see the relationships between the data, added Brill.

The scenario modeling component prioritizes events in terms of opportunities and risk.

B4 runs on BEA WebLogic on Windows and Solaris, IBM WebSphere, and Linux. B4 is shipping now.