HDFC Standard Life Insurance Co. Ltd's: Technology Enabled Business Transformation at its Best

No more can business and technology be looked at in isolation or even in fragments for that matter. It has to be a cohesive program that integrates the two seamlessly. That’s exactly what happened at HDFC Life. Read on...

HDFC Life is a well-known name in the insurance space in India, offering a range of individual and group insurance solutions for various customer needs like protection, pension, savings, investment and health. The company witnessed 23% growth vs. previous year in FY 2015.

With so much growth in both revenue and outreach, the company needed a well-defined strategy to sustain the momentum. The company has been driving a few strategic themes and multiple initiatives from them. Some of these themes include the need for an agile multi-distribution platform, driving digital leadership, achieve greater innovation in product selling and growing niches and economies of scale supported by horizontals, customer experience, technology enablement, risk mitigation & management, and skill development & workforce retention. To this effect, the company decided to leverage technology for driving business growth, and thus kick-started its TEBT (Technology-Enabled Business Transformation) program. TEBT covers business transformation with an outside in perspective along with straight through processing capability for most processes. It involves CRM, Mobility, RWD based Portals, SOA/BPM, Rules Engine, Data Warehousing/Mining, Information Security, and Employee Social Network.

IT’s Role in Transformation

The man at the helm of IT affairs in HDFC Life is Thomson Thomas, for whom the challenges to kick-start TEBT were multi-fold. There was an application portfolio that had grown in numbers and complexity over a period of time, leading to considerable change management exercises, as even a simple change in one placed required changes in multiple applications.

All this resulted into longer time to market, maintainability concerns in the functional, and scalability ones in non-functional area. The TEBT project was divided into 3 waves, with multiple releases in each wave. It covers transformational engagement that encompasses all levels of sales, service and marketing. Explaining the entire gamut of transformation is beyond the scope of this article, but the results of this transformation so far have been very heartening for the organization. There were improvements across all facets of business, including 100% automation and empowerment of sales force and operation rules, and USD 21.35 million worth of business converted already. A transformation of this level requires exceptional business technology leadership skills, which is why our jury decided to confer Thomson with the C-Change Enterprise Wide Digital Transformation award.