ICICI Lombard is one of the leading private sector general insurance companies in India with a Gross Written Premium (GWP) of Rs 69.14 billion for the year ended March 31, 2015. The company issued over 13.87 million policies and settled over 3.41 million claims as on March 31, 2015.
The corporate line of products of the company (including fire, marine, engineering, health, liability, and aviation) and the retail products (including personal accident, motor, health, and home) were running on legacy systems which had many drawbacks such as obsolete technology platforms with limited features and upgrade options, scalability issues, and integration incapability and higher cost of maintenance.
The company wanted to integrate all of its revenue generation systems in one platform and modernize employee productivity portals to leverage latest technology advancements.
The solution deployed
The insurance company has digitized all business processes to serve customers. Digitization journey started with legacy General Insurance products developed in D2K and classic ASP which later matured to a sophisticated enterprise architecture supporting all business needs. The company has built a robust technology platform to enable its business and meet customer expectations,’ says Goutam Datta, VP -Technology, ICICI Lombard. ‘We have not only overcome the shortcomings of legacy systems but carved the technology architecture in such a way that we can launch new products and services in
The company has built a robust technology platform to enable its business and meet customer expectations,’ says Goutam Datta, VP -Technology, ICICI Lombard. ‘We have not only overcome the shortcomings of legacy systems but carved the technology architecture in such a way that we can launch new products and services in agile way,’ adds Datta.
They have created the middleware layer which helps them to orchestrate and launch new products, and onboard tie-ups like plug and play. The web is made responsive to enable accessibility of the e-commerce portal from any device. The architecture also enables them to launch the mobile application with same user experience from all channels.
The employee productivity is also an integral part of their mobile strategy which enables them to make decisions faster, process compliance and employee travel, accommodation and other needs.
Drivers and targets
Scalability: With growing business volume and customer service scalability was a critical factor for them. The core policy admin system has to be scalable to book business from various sources such as agents, branches, e-commerce portal, mobile app and partner tie-ups. Their Policy Admin could manage 1.2 million policies in October 2015 while Claims Management portal could manage 5 million claims in last year.
Middleware: They have transformed from legacy applications to technology platforms which integrate multiple business channels such as branches, e-commerce, mobile platforms, agents, brokers and partner tie ups. In the middleware, they have created enterprise service bus which is consumed by all business channels. This has helped to avoid building similar logics multiple times, save cost and onboarding of new external partners quickly.
User experience: Speed and unified experience across web and mobile channels were critical success factors for them. Responsive web design helped in rendering same web pages across multiple devices with different screen resolutions. It also helped in saving web page design cost. The light weight pages auto adjust in different devices, offers personalization features and enriches user experience.
The strategy is also helping in having geography based marketing, upsell initiatives and launching hybrid mobile apps quickly. Additionally, they have used caching technology to reduce database and integration hops and deliver the dynamic contents very fast.
Quick partner onboarding: External partners have common requirements to integrate on real-time and on batch mode. Partner integration was time-consuming in case of the legacy policy admin systems. With ESB layer, they have developed common web services to cater to partner integration requirements with which they are able to onboard partners in lesser time.
Unified rule engine: De-tariff benefitted general insurance industry to grow while presenting a challenge in times of cut-throat competition. This called for agility in deciding and changing premium rules. Legacy systems were holding the premium calculation logics and changing the premiums was time-consuming.
The company transformed the premium rules from legacy systems to unified rule engine. This helped in managing the rates in an agile way without changing the premium calculation logics across web, mobile applications and partner integrations.
Mobility and employee productivity: Legacy web-based claims administration system transformed to mobile application. Motor claims mobile application helped in fast claim settlement, investigation and break-in inspection and to gain solid customer satisfaction.
The conventional third party administrator had huge dependency on fax and emails. This method also involved a lot of physical paper handling. The company has taken up initiative to digitize the paper based approvals to paperless cashless claims approvals to help customers by faster and hassle-free service.
The company has implemented the E-Cashless portal enabling hospitals to create cashless requests directly in their Claims Processing System. The project was conceptualized to facilitate cashless authorization processing online, to reduce time gap and bring more transparency to the healthcare services providers.
They have developed a mobile platform for faster decision making, compliance requirements, travel and accommodation needs for internal employees. The platform is integrated with travel agents and vendors, hotel online systems which book air tickets, cabs and accommodation on real-time basis.
The business benefits
Omni-channel platform: Omni-channel platform helped in similar user experience across devices. The platform has also helped in building the mobile apps in faster pace by reusable components.
Scalable platform: The platform is scalable and capable of managing an increasing number of transactions.
Policy transactions: In FY14, their systems processed 10.17 million transactions. In FY15, system throughput enhanced to process 12.25 million transactions. As of today in FY16, they could already process 10 million transactions and are expecting another 3.5 million transactions which will cross 13.5 million transaction mark by end of this financial year.
Claim transactions: In FY14, they processed 14.92 lakh claims. In FY15, the system capacity was improved to process 17.4 lakh claims. As of today, they have already processed 15.04 lakh claims and they are expecting another 3.5 lakh of claims which will cross 18.5 lakh claim transactions by end of this financial year. These numbers are excluding the group health business in government sector which is typically bulk upload and processed seamlessly.
Innovative solutions: Mobile based claims solution for real-time claim settlement
Ensuring the acceptability of the project
Agile methodology was used for the delivery of the project. This helped to avoid failures associated with big bang approach. The company now have an increased focus on mobility and they plan to take the cloud journey to next level of maturity. They are also planning to deploy robotic automation, says the CIO.
