N Eswaranatarajan, Head – Operations & Technology, ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Ltd., talked to KTP Radhika about innovative IT solutions that had helped the company improve its way of doing business and how Cloud computing, virtualization and BYOD were likely to impact the insurance sector
As an organization, ICICI Lombard General Insurance believes that technology should lead our business and that it should be an integral part of delivering growth and profitability for a top notch customer experience. IT works in close coordination with our business partners throughout the entire lifecycle of all initiatives and ensures that it delivers the expected business outcomes.
Tell us about the major IT projects that have had a considerable impact on your business.
Our IT landscape is distributed and vast. Our IT solutions are all centrally aligned. Everyone in the organization has access to various IT systems and solutions, which are centrally controlled. We have six core application systems that form the backbone for our entire sales and servicing functions. These include our e-commerce Web site, rules management system, core policy administration system, claims system, data warehouse & reporting system and the CRM system. Partnering with IT solution vendors, our aim is to deliver better service to our customers by using the most efficient and innovative technology services. Apart from these, there are several satellite applications and systems that support these core applications. Every year, we prioritize projects across these core and satellite systems or new innovation projects that can either improve operational efficiency or bring additional revenues or increase profitability for the company.
Can you recall any major IT deployment where you have been a part and have brought to conclusion in your organization? How did they impact your business?
There are two major implementations, which have significantly impacted and changed the way that we do business. The first is the roll out and scaling up of our core policy administration system. This changed the day-to-day functioning of the organization and brought in huge savings and process consistency for our staff and branch offices by providing them with an automated system that could support and issue policies for various products across our portfolio. The second has been the roll out of our e-channel Web site for retail customers that provides agents and brokers with a platform to instantly issue policies. Both of these initiatives have impacted the top line and bottom line for the company apart from delivering an improved customer experience.
Which are the IT projects that you are currently spearheading?
For FY 2012-13, we have three main areas of focus in terms of IT spend and innovative projects. One is to establish an enterprise-wide data warehouse platform to cater to our increasing need for standardized consolidated data, reporting and analytics. The second is to go directly to the retail customers with newer channels like mobile for both sales and servicing. The third is to focus on streamlining our IT delivery processes in order to consistently ensure predictable delivery for our business partners. Our motto for this is to be faster, better and cheaper.
Tell us about the new applications that you are rolling out and their likely benefits.
We are launching new applications in the mobile space. It is estimated that there are 884.37 million mobile telephone subscribers in India. Of these, over 50 million are mobile Internet users. Owing to this trend, mobile applications are showing exponential growth. We are also trying to benefit from this trend in terms of extending insurance services over mobile devices. Such initiatives will help us to save the cost of intermediation. We have been amongst the pioneers in launching various mobile initiatives to propel customer convenience and user experience. We expect that such mobile applications will give us a lot of speed and productivity gains.
What effect will Cloud computing and virtualization have upon the insurance segment?
Cloud Computing is an interesting phenomenon and a useful concept, something that all of us are used to in our day-to-day lives without realizing it. However, for it to catch up in the financial services and insurance space, it still has some way to go. Primarily, privacy and confidentially concerns still remain. In addition, the inertia to move from on-premise to the Cloud is a significant leap of faith to take for many financial services companies. Virtualization is different and is already being used in a big way. We use virtualization for our applications, desktops and our data center. This has helped us give more and better SLAs to our business partners for our core applications
Will the BYOD phenomenon have an impact on the insurance sector?
BYOD is fundamentally a good concept and we already allow that on the mobile side where our employees can bring in their own devices and connect to the organization’s e-mail server. On the core working system front, privacy and confidentially concerns remain and it will take time for this trend to catch on with regard to laptops etc.