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Executive Summary
CIO 100 Winner: Here's the story of an ingenious CIO who automated one of the most important pieces of the insurance business: the underwriting system, making life easier for both consumers and employees.
One of the top private sector insurance companies in India, Reliance Life Insurance is a unit of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group.
The Rs 4,536 crore insurance company with a recent addition of 1,250 branches is fast expanding. While this was good news, the company lacked a formal system for managing the steps involved in underwriting: receiving submissions, analyzing data, and providing approvals.
Case Study Highlights
"The system required insurance policy underwriters and application process agents to manually assemble all the information they needed from large paper files, analyze the data, and determine whether the customer should be offered coverage at all. This manual system took two weeks and was prone to errors," says C. Mohan, Chief Technoloyg Oficer, RLIC.
On top of that, opening so many new branches wasn't helping his cause. Mohan realized that he needed to reduce average underwriting turnaround time (TAT) from two weeks to a few hours. "We needed something that would have the scalability to meet future needs and the agility to react to changing market conditions, "he says.
Delay in revenue generation and reduced productivity motivated Mohan to go for a BPM solution to automate the process.
Now, an agent arrives at the branch and scans the application form and uploads them to the server. After the agent validates the information and enters required inputs, the data is updated on the document management system. "This data is then used to send as an underwriting and policy issuance request to process the response, which then automatically sends an e-mail notification based on business rules," explains Mohan.
The project was envisioned to cater to multiple business requirements and the solution addresses the issues of all stakeholders. Today, the project has set a new benchmark in the insurance industry by reducing processing error rate by 67 percent and operational cost by over 45 percent.
TAT has reduced from almost two weeks to a day. Automation has provided Reliance Life with complete visibility reducing errors, and subsequently increasing the quality of the process and customer satisfaction. Mohan says, "Today, the solution supports 900 concurrent users and volumes of up to 10,000 new policies per day during the peak season of January through March."
The Person Behind It
“The project has set a new benchmark in the insurance industry by reducing operational costs by over 45 percent."
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