C Mohan, CTO, Reliance Life Insurance, shares the benefits of automating the insurance application process and some other latest initiatives at his company with Biztech2.0.

What are some of the major challenges that the insurance industry is facing?

In the insurance business, the major part of urban business has already been tapped, so the potential now lies on the micro side (untapped rural areas). If one wishes to start and operate a micro insurance branch, connectivity and availability of applications to operational teams becomes a major challenge. In order to address these challenges, we have started a pilot where in we are rolling out micro branches, which will have a semi-online system. Connectivity can be provided either through dial up or broadband depending on availability. Thus, the experience for agent, customer and operational people remains the same. This also involves low investment, which gives rise to a profitable model to reach out to more parts of the country.

What is the IT architecture scenario at Reliance Life Insurance?

Last year, we have grown from 150 branches to 800 branches while our revenue has grown from Rs 970 crore to Rs 2700 crore, which is about 200 percent growth. This year again we are targeting another 300 percent growth and branch infrastructure is also going to double from 800 to 1600-2000 branches. It is going to be a challenge to support this kind of growth. At this point of time, all our infrastructure and applications are centralised.

We have deployed a transaction processing system from Computer Science Corporation, which is kept in the backend. We are keeping a very niche and thin IT application infrastructure at the branches so that everything can be processed in the middle as well as the back layer. The branch people only need to service customers, give receipts and take proposals from advisory. Most of these applications are Web based. We don’t use client server technology.

What are some of the latest IT initiatives?

In September 2007, we launched a ‘Life Line’ self-service portal for customers and agents. This portal provides insurance online. Both the customer and advisory portals are 24/7 self service portals, which carry information about policies, commission of advisors, customer entries and also offer self-service capabilities for address change, fund switch etc.

We are also in the process of rolling out a Web-based premium collection portal offering multiple gateways. This is based on a cluster technology, which uses IBM WebSphere portal, WebSphere process server etc. This portal is purely based on service oriented architecture. We are using process servers, DataStage and MQ channel to ensure that entire transaction is not point-to-point and instead uses an enterprise bus between the front end and back end layer. This is purely scalable and we have 50,000 agents as well as 100,000 customers tied to this portal.

What have been the challenges on the insurance application processing front?

After acquiring AMP Sanmar, we realised that the entire business process was in manual mode. The average time of proposal being handed over in the branch and a policy being received by customers was 15 days (ranging between 10 to 30 days). Hence, we thought of automating the entire insurance application process. This will reduce our policy turnaround time to seven days.

Which technologies have been used to automate the process?

We have installed scanning engines at all the branches where the proposal gets scanned. Following this, it is pushed further into the system and reaches our core system within a couple of days. We have also put in place an auto underwriting system, which measures and decides the risk involved in issuing a particular policy. A couple of days down the line, the policy reaches the customer. We are using the Savion BPM solution, a content management system from Documentum and all these systems are integrated using an enterprise bus system.

What are some of the major benefits of automation?

Automation has helped us to achieve Rs 2700 crore worth revenue in the past year. During the same period, 70 percent of the policies that came to our company were auto underwritten. This implementation has given us a huge RoI in many ways.

What are the benefits of decentralising the insurance application process?

Insurance application processing is generally always carried out in a centralised manner. The policies typically have to travel from all ends of the country to a centralised location resulting in increased turn around time of five to seven days. We wanted to reduce this turnaround time to one day or even lesser. Within the system which we have deployed, the entire information travels as an image rather than a physical paper, so any sort of MIS tracking becomes much easier.

In a centralised arrangement, the company not only requires more people but also huge premises to process a large number of applications from one location. We have made this system available in 800 branches and plan to extend it to almost 2,000 branches. Thus, this system not only offers cost saving but also faster turn around time.

What initiatives has Reliance Life planned for the future?

At present, when a policy is due or a claim is raised, the processing still takes place in a traditional manner. Customers come to the branches or the office to fill forms and have to wait for a certain period to receive the claim. We want to automate this entire activity so that the maturity and claim payment is automatically transferred to the customer’s account whenever intimation comes either through SMS, Web or through a drop-in at the branch.