Helping to Insure Information Accessibility at Reliance Life

Customer:
Reliance Life

Industry:
Insurance

Deployment country:
India

Solution: Business Process Management (BPM), Enabling Business Flexibility, Service Oriented Architecture

Over the last decade, the Indian insurance industry has undergone a substantial change, from being the domain of nationalized players to attracting foreign direct investment. Globalization and the consequent creation of new companies have sharply increased the competitive intensity and dynamism of the insurance business. This has fostered a need for greater flexibility in operations and processes to gain competitive advantage.

Business need:
Utilizing the power of technology to create a comprehensive self-service infrastructure to provide employees, agents and customers of Reliance Life Insurance with the information they need, when they need it, through a variety of channels

Solution:
Creating an efficient, scalable, comprehensive, self-service solution that allows Reliance Life to achieve its goal of building a virtual office and an end-to-end self-service portal. At the same time, ensuring that the solution's assets can be reused and extended to future efforts

Benefits:

• Streamlining processes and reducing Turn Around Time (TAT) in policy issuance and claims disbursement
• Providing consistent and updated information as and when needed
• Enhancing customer, agent and employee convenience
• Empowering customers by making information accessible through self-servicing facilities

Over the last decade, the Indian insurance industry has undergone a substantial change, from being the domain of nationalized players to attracting foreign direct investment. Globalization and the consequent creation of new companies have sharply increased the competitive intensity and dynamism of the insurance business. This has fostered a need for greater flexibility in operations and processes to gain competitive advantage.

As the industry has changed, so too has the customer-provider relationship. Insurance distribution is no longer the old "Feet on Street" (FOS) agency model but has become sophisticated and more effective with technology playing a greater role in enhancing services.

About Reliance Life Insurance Company Limited
Reliance Life Insurance Company Limited (Reliance Life) came into existence in 2003 and is a part of the Reliance - Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Since 2003, Reliance Life has carved a niche for itself in the insurance sector in India and has achieved the following:

• An incremental market share of 4.1 percent in new business premium for the Financial Year 2007-08 (from 3.9 percent in April 07 to 8 percent in February 08 (Source: IRDA))
• 1.7 million policies in just 2 years of operation
• Increased its distribution network by opening 600 branches in 10 months taking the overall branch network above 740
• Continues to be among the fast growing Private Life Insurance Companies with a YOY growth of 195 percent in new business premium as of March 08

Reliance Life is also one of the two life insurance companies in India to be certified ISO 9001:2000 for all processes. Thus, it has leveraged accessibility and product innovation to gain market prominence.

Creating efficiency through virtual office Reliance Life had ambitious objectives:

• Open 400 new branches across India
• Achieve market leadership in the private sector by March '09
• Achieve break even in results by 2009-10
• Ensure continuous innovation and development of products

Reliance Life selected IBM to help it implement its "virtual office" due to IBM's proven expertise in implementing innovative technology in the insurance sector. IBM also offered comprehensive solutions to increase flexibility and market visibility.

The IBM team worked closely with Reliance Life to fully understand the existing infrastructure and strategy for the future. With the business roadmap clearly defined, the IBM team set about designing a solution that would meet not only the current requirements but would form the base for Reliance Life's expansions.

As the first stage, IBM and Reliance Life decided to leverage the power of the Internet to create a Virtual Office. Implemented as a comprehensive portal, the Virtual Office would act as the focal point of real-time interactions for customers, agents and employees alike.

In order to achieve its ambitions, Reliance Life decided to incorporate technology to create a Virtual Office that would help its:

• Customers - view products, pay premiums, buy policies online, view documents required for claims
• Agents - view details of interested customers and service their needs. The agents now have a unified view of the customer and can service customer requirements more intelligently by suggesting products that fill gaps in the portfolio
• Employees - manage customer activities and their own company-related activities

The Virtual Office would increase accessibility and reduce redundant processes and procedures, increasing Reliance Life's ability to react instantly to customer demands-giving it an edge in an extremely competitive market.

IBM-Helping insure technology

The IBM team managed the entire lifecycle of the project from solution design to implementation and delivery. The new infrastructure was built with composite business services to speed implementation and enable re-use. The solution was deployed using components of the IBM Insurance Process Acceleration framework including WebSphere㈢ middleware with open-standards-based technology. As a result, the infrastructure could incorporate various backend systems and be customized to meet Reliance Life's specific requirements.

IBM and Reliance Life decided to leverage the power of the Internet to create a Virtual Office. IBM WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Process Server were used to create a comprehensive portal that would streamline the delivery and presentation of information; making information available to the right people at the right time.

IBM WebSphere Portal software provided a business mashup framework and the advanced tooling needed to build flexible, service oriented architecture (SOA)-based solutions, as well as scalability to service the needs of a growing organization. In addition, WebSphere Process Server helped ensure interoperability and flexibility as part of the SOA through adoption of popular standards, such as BPEL, Web services, JMS and XML.

Reliance Life chose IBM WebSphere Integration Developer and IBM Rational㈢Application Developer as the development platforms because of their rapid application development capabilities.

IBM WebSphere Integration Developer helped Reliance Life develop and deploy solutions rapidly because:

• It can import models from the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler and so helps jump start the implementation.
• It allows for visual development of SOA-based integration solutions across WebSphere Process Server through the use of drag and drop facility.
• It enables wiring together of reusable service components

These IBM software components helped Reliance Life create a single, comprehensive source of information enabling disparate business units to work together more efficiently.

The Results

The IBM self-service solution, deployed with the IBM Insurance Process Acceleration framework, helped Reliance Life achieve the following objectives:

• Reduced time to provide new products to the market
• Increased sales by allowing agents faster access to information
• Improved information access for all the stakeholders through multiple channels
• Improved customer service by enabling end users to utilize self-service options
• Increased internal efficiencies through redesigned workflows

The IBM cross-brand solution provides a consistent and unified contact with customers across the organization, supporting the company's ambitious growth objectives. With this solution in place, the company has been able to grow significantly, becoming the third largest private insurer in India in 2008.

For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at:
ibm.com/websphere

For more information on Reliance Life, visit:
www.reliancelife.co.in

IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Software:
WebSphere DataStage Server, WebSphere Portal Server, WebSphere QualityStage Enterprise Edition, WebSphere DataStage Enterprise Edition, WebSphere Business Modeler, WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Business Modeler

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2009
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Produced in the United States of America
April 2009
All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, DataStage, Rational and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other product, company or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of comparable results. References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. WSC14095-USEN-00