Reliance General Insurance : Policy Kit System

Do you still remember the old account opening procedure in banks! One spent a

whole day filling in the lengthy form and got verifications done from different

officials. If that wasn't enough, you were called after a few days to collect

the passbook and just in case you wanted a cheque book to go with it, yet

another round of applications would begin. That has all changed with the entry

of private banks, as first the passbook was done away with and replaced with

monthly or quarterly statements and second, the cheque book has been neatly

packaged with a set of introductory documents to form a nice and handy kit, to

be carried along by the customer as soon as the application form is accepted.

The same analogy applies to insurance companies where the old procedure was more

or less similar and in some cases even worse. Customers had to follow-up at

regular intervals before the policy papers were finally dispatched to their

addresses. The Policy Kit system is an initiative aimed to reduce the TAT of the

insurance policy issuance process by introducing an OTC product.

The original idea for the system came from intense debates on how to simplify

the policy issuance procedure for Health policies which typically took 7-10 days

followed by another 10-15 days for processing a Health Card issued by a TPA. The

IT team came up with the idea of creating a product that is similar to the

account opening kit in banking. Along with the Product development team they

engaged in a series of business sessions to reengineer the operations and Sales

processes to suit such a product and delivery mechanism. The IT team developed a

front end portal based on Microsoft technologies (.NET 2.0 and SQL Server 2005)

to enable issuance of such kits at the point of Sale with minimum data entry.

The services that have been deployed to facilitate this system are SQL Server

reporting services, SQL Server integration services, Windows Communication

Services and mailing services. The system also supports multiple channels like

web, telecall and other regular channels.

As part of Reliance General Insurance he handles business process management, the enterprise portal, enterprise service bus besides handling the software development team for handling initiatives on Operations, Underwriting, Human resource,Multi Channel Sales and Marketing and Claims Management Systems Prashant Pandey, Sr Mgr - IT Q What was the business problem that led you to implement this project? The time taken for issuing a new policy to a customer used to take very long. This led to frequent customer complaints and queries, and also loss ot business to competition. So, we decided to have a system in place, whereby the policy could be given over-the-counter to the customer. Q What were the challenges faced during this implementation? Over the Counter Policy Issuance was a totally new Concept in terms of implementation in insurance sector. There was a marked emphasis to reach to customers and intermediaries through innovative and unique ways for insurance policy sales with negligible operational TAT. A major challenge was to implement the process within IRDA Guidelines within a stipulated deadline of 20 days (including testing). We started with health kit (Reliance Health wise medi-claim policy with TPA Card) distribution and sale. The intention was to sell the policy by handing over the policy kit immediately anywhere anytime as soon as the payment is received from the customer. After this stage was successful, the company included more modules for products such as Home Protect and Farmer's Package policy. The system has been developed to handle kit distribution to all points of sale with complete end to end tracking and reconciliation along with policy issuance and premium calculation logic.

Over the Counter Policy Issuance was a totally new Concept in terms of

implementation in insurance sector. There was a marked emphasis to reach to

customers and intermediaries through innovative and unique ways for insurance

policy sales with negligible operational TAT. A major challenge was to implement

the process within IRDA Guidelines within a stipulated deadline of 20 days

(including testing). They started with health kit (Reliance Health wise medi-claim

policy with TPA Card) distribution and sale. The intention was to sell the

policy by handing over the policy kit immediately anywhere anytime as soon as

the payment is received from the customer. After this stage was successful, the

company included more modules for products such as Home Protect and Farmer's

Package policy. The system has been developed to handle kit distribution to all

points of sale with complete end to end tracking and reconciliation along with

policy issuance and premium calculation logic.

The system was completely integrated in fully automated mode with multiple

third party administrators (TPAs). This involved several discussions required a

consensus on integration signatures with various vendors. The front end portal

was linked to the core backend using Biztalk. The risk with such a process is to

ensure that kits are easily managed on the field and a proper reconciliation is

possible at any given point of time. Do remember that the nature of the kits is

such that they can be misused easily. So a robust and secure kit allocation and

tracking module was developed to ensure risk minimization. The kit system

brought down the operational cost of issuance by half by making redundant the

logistics involved with document movement (as discussed earlier in the banking

analogy). The ease of use and simplicity of application was taken care of as the

system is to be used by various verticals. Also, as the system has to potential

to penetrate to the remotest corners, the launch involved extensive travel and

training across the length and breadth of country. Approx 3.5 lakh policies have

been sold collecting Rs 100 crore as premium within nine months of launch.

Implementation Partner

Shrikant Bhosale A G Technologies 1. What IT solutions did you suggest to Reliance? To fulfill their business problem, we designed a Web based application to make system available to all users irrespective of client system platform. The user interfaces were intelligently designed to minimize training issues. There are role based user friendly reports to see the stock and policy issuance and other MIS report. The system is flexible to incorporate new products with similar type and accept changing business rules. Proper project management, planned database structure and new technologies (MS .NET Framework 2.0, BizTalk 2006 and SQL Server 2005) helped a lot to overcome quick solution delivery, integration challenges and concurrency problems. 2. What were the challenges that you encountered while deploying the IT solution? The biggest challenge was the development and rollout within 20 days of time. Integration of our system with other core/legacy system in heterogeneous platform was another challenge.