Kotak Life Insurance redefines its digital assets

Kirti Patil is Executive Vice President and CTO at Kotak Life Insurance and is accountable for aligning the company’s technology strategy with its business vision, and business requirements to provide the organisation a competitive edge.

“We have embraced a mobile-first and user-experience-driven portal strategy for all its stakeholders – customers, distributors, and employees. Data and analytics are key to Digital transformation. In IT, they need to move from data centres to centres of data – structured and unstructured. The focus in the coming years will be on creating a data warehouse and data lake to address the data requirements of the digital business,” states Patil.

Kotak Life Insurance is investing in technology to recreate digital assets for enhancing customer experience, reduce processing time and ensuring anywhere, anytime and any device availability of these services.

“Re-usability and inter-operability are integral components of our IT philosophy for several years. Now the focus is on API and micro-service driven solutions. While we have been using API integration with our group and the individual customers, we have just commenced implementation of an API Management solution. The architecture for our new customer portal is micro-services driven,” mentions Patil.

Key digital elements
The Kotak Life Insurance foresees digital transformation as re-imagining the business with a digital-first mindset. Their objective of digital is to enhance the customer experience at all the touch points, empower distributors and provide convenience, energise and empower employees, improve process efficiency and effectiveness.

Patil reveals that to not only do things differently but THINK differently, the group is taking a zero-based or first-principles approach to deliver actual value to end-users.

The digital transformation initiatives are completely synchronised with the technology transformation initiatives to make the most of the emerging, new-age technologies, creating extremely simple and intuitive customer journeys, building a foundation for data-driven decisions. And, simplification of products and processes for instant fulfillment and self-service wherever possible.

Recent digital project

One of the most critical initiatives is towards building digital assets for employees by strengthening internal support systems, measuring the happiness quotient, personalisation and training for growth, better servicing of internal and external customers through intelligent workflow mechanisms, RPA.

Providing the sales hierarchy complete visibility of the progress of the daily activities of a geographically dispersed sales force, is a challenge today. “We are in the process of implementing a lead and activity management solution for our sales force spanning all channels. This will improve predictability and help nudge the force in the right direction” she explains.

Empowering the last mile with right tools, right insights and rule-based self-service service, Patil has implemented a responsive Sales Fulfillment application for the distributor workforce. About 90 per cent of the business is sourced through this physical route. “We are now implementing a business rule engine to enhance STP leading to faster issuance. This will also help us provide a no-go decision at the time of sourcing,” she says.

Analytics to deepen customer relationships

Patil mentions, “Our ultimate goal is to support the group’s mission of ‘Bringing assurance to customer’s lives’. Even our analytics projects flow from that philosophy – build value to customers, that customers need and will appreciate, rather than from an inside-out perspective.”

The group is using analytics for persistency enhancement, fraud analytics and cross-sell. But these are siloed programmes.

Creation of an analytics COE will help them build the data lake, build personas and will work on behavioral as well as transaction data. The solution will work towards enriching internal data with external sources and value engagement for customers and distributors at right moments in the lifecycle.