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Raju Sharan, Financial Advisor, United India Insurance Company Limited

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Insurance market has been at its evolutionary best for last 1 year or so.

From opening the market to private players to de-tariffing, the metamorphosis

has just begun. This is the first challenge unique to Insurance.

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Raju Sharan started his professional career in 1989 with the State Bank of

India and joined Government of India (Indian Civil Accounts Service) in 1990.

Since then, he has served in various capacities and in several Ministries and

Departments, and also with World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the

United Nations. Since December 2003, he has been working on deputation as

Financial Advisor to United India Insurance Company Limited.

Raju Sharan,

Financial Advisor, United India Insurance Company Limited

What role is IT playing in the growth of your organization?



IT systems have become the backbone of day to day operations today,

computerizing core business processes like underwriting, claims and accounts.

More and more back office works like pension, PF, housing loan are being

computerized which has substantially improved efficiency and relieved load of

manually doing above. Decision support system has helped top management get

better visibility and helped business decisions to be more precise and

scientific. Statistical analysis of our previous experience in a particular

portfolio is possible at the click of a button. All in all, IT has come a long

way from being business enabler. Rather, it is the business today because in all

likelihood, if your IT is not good your business isn't either.

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What are some unique challenges that the Insurance sector is facing today

that IT can resolve?



Insurance market has been at its evolutionary best for last 1 year or so.

From opening the market to private players to de-tariffing, the metamorphosis

has just begun. This is the first challenge unique to Insurance — it is growing

very fast and at the same time changing very fast. IT not only has to cope with

these changes but on many fronts like dynamic rating define them too.

The IT system has to be very flexible, it has to make business transactions

more affordable and finally it has to provide better service levels to each

customer—big and small, nearby and distant.

How difficult is it to manage a huge but distributed environment like

yours? How does IT help in this?



It is a Herculean task to put together business figures from all branches

and derive company wide reports. IT has solved that problem by implementing a

mechanism of periodically transferring data to central location and thus

building a central data repository that can give you all the reports you want.

Another point worth mentioning is implementing corporate messaging system and IP

telephony has made information dissemination even in a distributed environment

easy.

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