Insurance

In less than 4 years of operations, ICICI Prudential has sold more than 750,000 policies. Competitive as the industry is, customer service and innovatively structuring customer options is the major differentiator in the Insurance business. To further enable itself to offer better service and choice to customers and to prepare itself to meet this aggressive quantum growth plan, they identified that the IT infrastructure, the foundation for evolving customer-centric business plans needed to be scalable for deployment and usage of proven insurance application.

The solution was to deploy a tested and proven insurance application to streamline processes, capture and retrieve information on customers, products and business health, help with MIS reporting and enable the business to provide customer-focused product offerings. At the same time, ICICI Prudential was not interested in setting up complex data centre operations and proliferate servers and applications.

Considering that ICICI Prudential wanted to have Information Technology purely to serve business and to help growth through superior product data and customer response systems, the solution by IBM, a combination of LifeAsia/400 suite of insurance solutions from CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) deployed on the IBM iSeries servers, was a perfect fit. CSC's LIFE Asia offers end-end solutions in the area of ¡¥life and pensions" products using the IBM eServer iSeries platform. Life Asia/400 is a comprehensive, low-risk, back-office application for life insurance and pensions. This application runs on a central IBM iSeries Model 810. The system currently supports more than 450 users. ICICI Prudential also uses a Model 820 as a back-up and development server.

At ICICI Prudential, the overall IT solution and the strong processes have always been the backbone for managing the business. The accelerated growth and heightened customer responsiveness have been achieved through the IT solutions and infrastructure put in place by ICICI Prudential. The IT Infrastructure consisting of IBM eServer iSeries solutions has been highly reliable, secure and easy to manage thus reducing the administrative burden on the IT team. Specific benefits of deploying the LifeAsia solutions on the iSeries have been :

• 24 x 7 availability of system for business
• Ability to handle large number of concurrent users and transaction volumes with ease

"IBM eServer iSeries has enabled us to provide reliable, consistent and 24 x 7 support to our business users and customers. EServer iSeries along with Core Life Administration System has enabled us to stay ahead of competition in terms of technology and service." said Anil Tikoo, Head - Information Technology, ICICI Prudential

ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company is a joint venture between ICICI Bank, a premier financial powerhouse, and Prudential plc, a leading international financial services group headquartered in the United Kingdom. ICICI Prudential was amongst the first private sector insurance companies to begin operations in December 2000 after receiving approval from Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA).

ICICI Prudential's equity base stands at Rs. 675 crore with ICICI Bank and Prudential plc holding 74% and 26% stake respectively. In the year ended March 31, 2004, the company had issued over 430,000 policies, for a total sum assured of over Rs 8,000 crore and premium income in excess of Rs. 980 crore. Today the company is the #1 private life insurer in the country.

ICICI Prudential has one of the largest distribution networks amongst private life insurers in India, having commenced operations in 57 cities and towns in India. The company has recruited and trained over 30,000 insurance agents to interface with and advise customers and has eleven banc assurance tie-ups. Further, it leverages its state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to provide superior quality of service to customers.

Computer Science Corporation (CSC) and IBM are alliance partners in developing applications for the insurance and financial services industries worldwide. CSC's applications span a wide spectrum of IBM platforms, including eSever pSeries, eServer iSeries, in addition to using a broad variety of IBM middleware technologies. Clients benefit from this alliance by virtue of CSC having early access to IBM's technologies and the subsequent ability to leverage these unique technologies into insurance applications by CSC.