Back of the book

Conversation with functional head

Bajaj Allianz, a private general and health insurance company was looking for IT support to reach out to customers in shortest possible time. V Philip, COO and Thomas Varghese, CIO have played a vital role in driving business efficiencies and growth using IT.

Thomas Varghese CIO

V. Philip COO

How do you see the market opportunity in your domain?

VP: In the past decade, the insurance industry has witnessed many changes and it continues to evolve. Liberalization of the sector led to other developments such as introduction of ULIP’s (unit link insurance plan) and detariffication in general insurance have led to an increased awareness for insurance. Today, insurance have become important part of investment portfolio with investors. Additionally the market has seen plenty of new product offering for customers, which has forced insurance companies to focus on acquiring customers faster.

However, there are significant percentage of our population who does not have any insurance cover. As per statistics, the penetration of insurance in the country is 4.60% which indicates that there is still a vast market that needs to be covered. Thus, the insurance industry has an immense potential to grow, both in the life and non-life domains, in rural as well as urban geographies.

TV: In the last few years, there have been some major developments in the industry which have acted as catalysts for the growth. It included evolution of new products, new distribution channels, increased awareness about the insurance benefits, increased footprints of the various insurance companies and expansion into newer geographies, meeting customer demands through Web based service and so on.

The general insurance in specific has rolled out large number of products in the liability, travel, health and entertainment sectors, which was previously untapped market. Customized insurance packages hit the media and entertainment industry to compensate for losses on account of expenses made towards organizing events and other extravaganza. The distribution of channels has played an important role in the growth of the insurance sector with the evolution of motor dealers, travel agents, corporate agents, micro-finance institutions and Internet banking becoming the cost-effective distribution channel. The IT enabled services including emergence of call centers, mobile payments and collection services etc., have given customers the access to all insurance requirements from purchase to claims settlement without visiting an insurer’s office.

Can you give us an instance where information availability had made a difference to your business?

VP: The availability of information acts as a differentiating factor for each of our stakeholders including our customers, sales, services and operations.

TV: We are using a CRM application that provides real-time information about customer data, which has helped our customer service executive to service customers better. Additionally, the customer data has helped our sales team to reply to customer queries in shortest time from any remote location. Information availability is also helping us to track the delivery of services in terms of dissemination of policy information, update on acceptance of proposal, policy issuance, dispatch and like. All these business information is available on a real-time basis for the top management to take business decisions.

What are the significant business challenges you both have faced?

VP: My biggest challenge had been to sustain growth and profitability in this dynamic changing business environment.

TV: Despite slow economic growth, we have grown our business volumes significantly and we need to find newer ways to keep ahead of our competition. Therefore our focus is to automated our business processes and optimize our existing operating costs to increase our growth.

Can you recall any major IT deployment where you have been the pioneer?

VP: We believed in automation of workflow to manage and track business processes such as in policy- claim processing, grievance handling, tracking customer interactions, policy approval systems etc. It helped us to evolve a faster response to customers driven by seamless flow of information through various departments. Further, implementation of contact centers solutions helped us to process customer requirements and provide proactive, faster and effective services. This lead to high customer satisfaction and customer loyalty through reduction in turn-around time, improvement in service levels and better productivity.

TV: While the deployment of workflow management solutions had helped us to meet our business requirements, the evolution of B2C and B2B portals have helped us to increase sales. Data warehouse and MIS are other two major projects that we have deployed, which helped the top management to take decisions on-the-fly across customer segments.

Which are the three technologies that your company have invested in 2009?

VP: Being in the insurance industry it was important for us to speed up the policy issuance and processing time. Our key deployment has been around call center solutions and biometric authentication to bring the best results in terms of our product acceptance.

TV: The deployment of image striping and work flow automation has brought tangible and intangible benefits. All the IT deployments and projects have been evaluated as a catalyst for growth through productivity and optimization mechanism.

Which are top technology trends you are following in 2010?

VP: In the current year, our priorities will be enhancing customer service, increasing productivity of employees and reducing operational costs. So therefore our IT investments in 2010 would be around it.

Additionally buying insurance is often seen as a complex task with the large amount of documentation involved. With the increase in automation and other technology platforms, the industry would not only speed-up the turn-around-time on various customer requests but also simplify insurance to enable customers to buy it off-the-shelf.

TV: We are looking at technologies that add value to customers. For example self-service or service-on-the-move would help customers to reduce the number of physical visits required to insurance office for buying products. The insurance industry would continue to use technology to lower transaction costs and increase penetration. The industry will increase usage of innovative technology platforms to make it affordable to the vast sections of the society who are still out of the insurance ambit.

geetha.nandikotkur@expressindia.com