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.
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, |
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.
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.