The departure of former president and chief operating officer Robert Cooney from X.L. Insurance has raised questions over the direction a subsidiary of the company will take.

In the December edition of Business Insurance, InQuisLogic (IQL) is reportedly on hold as XL refocuses their enterprise risk tool.

According to the magazine article, IQL began to draw attention last spring when it announced it would be marketing a new information system designed to help risk managers identify and manage enterprise risk.

The Stamford Connecticut based company is a unit of Bermuda based XL Capital Limited and had attracted Aon Corporation and International Business Machines Corporation as potential financial partners.

But the effort to bring on-board outside investors has been put on hold as IQL regroups and concentrates attention on developing a system for in-house use for XL Capital units.

The article suggests that Mr. Cooney's departure from XL may have slowed IQL's product development and may have played a part in IQL's change in direction.

The company was originally established to create a product to be distributed industry-wide and now has changed to creating one for in-house use.

Richard R. Morano, interim president of of IQL and president and chief executive officer of Global Services, a support services unit of XL Capital, revealed that several issues have still to be resolved before an in-house system is completed.

But he could not be drawn on what the company's next move is "I want to make sure we have everything lined up before we make any further announcements and raise any more expectations in the marketplace,'' he said.

The article notes that the risk management industry would welcome with open arms a system they could all use and quotes an executive of Aon as saying: "Our people thought, `My gosh, we finally found the right way to do this,' because one company can't do that by itself.

"You need to have an industry initiative. It's like a lot of other issues; the industry needs to get together, and the industry seems to find it very hard to get together.''