A new IT system being developed by IAG in New Zealand to link with brokers is running up to a year behind schedule and reportedly costing an extra $1 million a month.

The system, which is understood to also involve second-largest NZ Insurer Vero – is understood to have been designed and built by British IT company Sirius. The system is understood to be intended to parallel the sort of services Australian brokers and insurers get from Sunrise Exchange. New Zealanders have not adopted the Telstra-operated Australian service.

A report on NZ website Computerworld says IAG now doesn’t expect to get to the first phase of its implementation before the last quarter of this year. The project – known appropriately enough as Endeavour – was originally scheduled to be completed by the middle of last year, but Computerworld quoted industry sources expressing “little faith in it being fully operable before early 2005”.

The problem is understood to be in the system testing, but the report also suggests the system was inadequately specified at the beginning of its development and that the Sirius platform is “in an incomplete state”.

IAG NZ’s CIO Catherine Rusby has admitted that “some additional bugs and functionality expectation differences” were discovered. Computerworld says the delays are “rumoured to be as much as $1 million a month”.