CXO Speak On The relevance of IT for their business

Expert opinions from CXOs of India' s leading enterprises on the issues faced by their industries and how they use IT to stay ahead

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Deepak Satwalekar
CEO and MD, HDFC Standard Life Insurance

The challenging business environment will force life insurance companies to rethink the fundamentals of their business

The Indian Insurance sector has come a full circle. It started as an open market, became nationalized, and it's back to being liberal again. Things today however are different. More players are vying for market share, there's much more competition, and lots of other issues. Deepak tells us about the issues that plague the Indian insurance sector, and how his company has been using IT to surge forward.

Q HDFC Standard Life recorded an impressive 63% YoY growth in the previous financial year. How much of that success can be attributed to the usage of IT?
IT is integral to our business. It is not a separate stand alone function. The use of appropriate technology has helped drive sales processes, new business processing, claims administration, and almost every function within the organization.

This growth has been enabled by collaboration of the employees, Internet based self servicing for our Financial Consultant community, and our retail and group (company) customers.

IT has been used laterally to increase productivity, and to execute customer servicing processes in a cost effective manner.

Q What's the relevance of IT for HDFC Standard Life Insurance's business?
IT is all pervasive in our organization. We have refocused IT around the business drivers. The application of critical technology has been crucial in developing successful business partnerships, implementing effective outsourcing arrangements and having the ability to create, analyze, handle and distribute huge amounts of data across geographies to create value for all stakeholders.
IT has enabled us to create a centralized virtual organization where time and distance are irrelevant.

Digitized workflow solutions have enhanced the quality of policy administrations as well as improved customer servicing.

The absence of paper moving around has resulted in enhanced customer data confidentiality - something which is critical to our business.

We are further dependent on IT to ensure integrity of our policy administration systems and thereby the inputs for Insurance valuation.

We have initiated a COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology - www.cobit.org) process for Change Management and are working towards its certification.

Our objective is to leverage technology to enhance the productivity of a mobile work force, achieve growth with sustained performance by building strong processes, and create a service differentiator in a converged financial services market.

QWhat are some of the key issues that plague the Indian insurance sector?
There are a few issues that face the insurance industry that I would like to highlight.

The first is regulatory convergence. In an increasingly fast converging financial sector, we need to remove sectoral regulatory walls and pockets of arbitrary decision making, in favor of a cross sectoral regulatory framework spanning across narrow boundaries of individual regulatory agencies.

Second would be the issue of risk management. A more volatile business environment, increasingly stringent regulatory requirements, complex products and restrictions on hedging instruments, will require insurers to significantly upgrade their enterprise wide risk management capabilities.

The third issue relates to the absence of proper performance measurement metrics leading to distortions in product features and sales practices.

The fourth issue would be something which corporate India is facing - the shortage of skilled and trained human resources. This could be the one overriding factor that could stunt the growth of the industry or expose it to significant unplanned risks.

And finally, the challenging business environment will force life insurance companies to rethink the fundamentals of their business.

They will need to concentrate on the core fundamentals - focus on and successfully meet customers' needs, make optimal use of technology to improve product offerings and level of service and abide by a philosophy that shirks short cuts and unethical practices.

Page(s)   1  2  3  4  5  6