Actuate Corporation (NASDAQ: BIRT), The BIRT Company™ – delivering more insights to more people than all BI companies combined, today announced the results of a significant online business intelligence project with DNB Finans, one of the largest finance companies in the Nordic region.

DNB Finans, a subsidiary of DNB Bank Group, is a major player in the car financing market with more than 300,000 financed vehicles in its portfolio. To maintain its edge in a difficult market, the Autolease division of DNB Finans was looking for additional ways to add value for its clients, by helping them to reduce costs.

ReportSoft, Actuate’s exclusive reseller partner in the Nordic and Benelux region, has provided the company with a sophisticated business intelligence solution which allows managers to analyze vehicle-related spending online, as an extension to its existing car-lease application. The application harnesses Actuate’s powerful business intelligence and reporting platform ActuateOne^® and the open source BIRT development environment which underpins it, and caters to DNB Finans’s 30,000 leased-car customers.

Commenting on the importance of the new solution to the business as a whole, Claus Wittrup Hansen, Assistant Vice-President of IT Finance at DNB Bank, said, “Our customers now have early visibility of issues such as excessive mileage or fuel-related fraud, and the ability to pinpoint the business units responsible. This enhances their ability to act, and is likely to increase their loyalty to us. It is a significant competitive differentiator.”

DNB Finans expects a return on investment within 2.5 years. By this spring, the reporting platform is due to have been deployed to all 30,000 of its customers. “Actuate is extremely intuitive and easy to use, so take-up has exceeded all expectations,” Mr Wittrup Hansen said.

Since adopting the Actuate solution, DNB Finans has seen customer satisfaction levels soar from 4.4 to 5.1 on a scale of 1-6 for ‘quality of reporting solution’. The system has also drawn an additional 31% user logins, significantly increasing activity on the company’s online car financing system.

The online tool provides up-to-date management information about fuel usage, CO2 emissions, leasing expenditure, vehicle damage and other variables – with easy access to status reports and alerts to potential fraud. Activity can be viewed in alignment with each company’s particular cost structure. The solution is highly intuitive, delivering visual dashboards, and includes logical controls for fraud detection and easy administration of the car fleets. Security can be managed discretely so that clients can see only the information they are authorized to view.

The platform is also highly configurable: Actuate’s BIRT 360 dashboard technology lets users drag their choice of report and visual components onto their personal dashboards so that they are able to view the information that is most relevant to them. Actuate’s out-of-the-box BIRT Studio enables DNB Finans’ clients to select particular columns and rows and compile their own reports for analytical purposes.

The online cost-monitoring application, which was recognized in the 2012 European Software Excellence Awards, is being heavily marketed across Scandinavia to promote DNB Finans’ car financing business and the broader DNB brand.

The next steps will be to further integrate the reporting platform with other business applications to further enhance the value provided to customers, and to deliver the content via a customer reporting portal.

Highlighting the importance of Actuate’s technology to the project, Henrik Vester Christensen, Chairman of ReportSoft, commented, “The superior power, flexibility and simplicity of the Actuate BI and reporting technology suite brought unique value to the DNB Finans project. I don’t know any other solution that could have delivered the same results.”

Actuate – The BIRT Company^™

Actuate founded and co-leads the BIRT open source project, which is used by more than 2 million developers around the globe and serves as the foundation of the ActuateOne^® platform. Applications built on ActuateOne deliver more business and consumer insights to more people than all BI companies combined - ensuring organisations are ready for the exponential growth of Big Data and the proliferation of touch devices.

The ActuateOne platform empowers developers to rapidly develop custom, BIRT-based business analytics and customer communications applications. ActuateOne applications built with one BIRT design can access and integrate any data, including unstructured sources. They provide one user experience regardless of skill level and are supported by one platform for any cloud, hybrid, on-premise, web or touch device deployment.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Actuate has over 5,000 customers globally in a diverse range of business areas including financial services, technology and the public sector. Actuate is listed on NASDAQ under the symbol BIRT. For more information, visit www.actuate.com or engage with the BIRT community at www.birt-exchange.com.

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