IndiaFirst Life Insurance automates Straight Through Processing for policy issuance in 30 Mins

Headquartered in Mumbai, IndiaFirst Life Insurance, with a share capital of Rs 475 crore, is one of the country’s youngest life insurance companies. It is promoted by two of India’s largest public sector banks-Bank of Baroda and Andhra Bank along with UK’s leading risk, wealth and investment company, Legal & General. The Bank of Baroda holds a 44 percent stake in IndiaFirst, while Andhra Bank and Legal & General hold 30 and 26 percent respectively.

Started in 2009, the company is dotted in about 1000 cities and towns across the country through 6000 partner bank branches. It has covered over 2.7 million lives and has over Rs. 6,500 Crores of AUM in 4 years of operations.

The overall insurance industry in India is expected to boom with the opening up of FDI in this sector. Industry players are hence expecting innovation to come in the market, thus giving consumers a wider variety of choices and ease of process.

Eying the booming industry, IndiaFirst Life Insurance sells insurance plans, including life insurance, investment funds, and group policies. The company’s product range covers protection (term insurance), savings, education and retirement. It has a range of group insurance products for credit, life, term and employee liability (gratuity and leave encashment) plans as well. They have recently introduced a range of health, pension and wealth accumulation plans.

Challenges Faced

The company wanted to automate post sales process for higher operational efficiency. It also wanted to cut down issuance TAT (Turnaround Time) in the Life Insurance Industry which used to take more than 15 days. In addition, there was delay in submission of new business applications for processing, and the incomplete new business applications were reaching back office resulting in delays in issuance.

The firm was also eager to counter mis-selling by making verification calls while scrutinizing data and documents. Mis-selling broadly means unfair or fraudulent practices in soliciting or selling policies not sought by a customer, or when a customer feels the policy sold to them is different from what was promised.

The Implementation

IndiaFirst implemented Straight Through Processing, an OTC policy issuance process where the cases were issued in 30 minutes from the data received on the server. Understandably, the company automated the whole process. The sales team transfers policy data from their tablets to auto-underwriting engine to get policy decisions, from where the complete process is automated.

On transferring data from tablet based sales application, data is received on server and pushed to ‘auto underwriting engine’ to get the policy decision. Auto underwriting engine checks underwriting rules and also de-dupes to check whether it’s an existing client. Post auto underwriting, an instance gets automatically created in the workflow i.e. yet to start bucket, and immediately moves to Verification Calling along with data & documents. Then, the verification calling team opens the application, calls the customer, verifies the data entered with the customer and checks whether the documents submitted by customer are acceptable or not.
If the auto underwriting decision is passed and documents submitted are acceptable, the case is issued by the call centre agent on the front end system. If the decision is failed or the documents submitted are not acceptable, the same is communicated to customer over the call. On issuing the case in front end system, an SMS confirmation with the policy pack link as well as email with the policy PDF is sent to the customer. This entire process is executed within five minutes on receipt of data on the server. The data is then pushed to Life Asia via Business objects to create the client and contract in Life Asia.

The process needs minimum human intervention, and has reduced the number of complaints significantly, which as a by-product is satisfying the customers of IndiaFirst. The company has used Savvion’s workflow automation technology, Android based apps on about 1000 Samsung tablets, a dialer application, and a rules engine for auto underwriting.

The Results

The company received around 45,150 cases out of which, 38,879 were cleared by the auto underwriting engine. The productivity of sales has also improved considerably. The implementation has also reduced the chances of mis-selling while doing calls, verifying data and documents and hence reduces overall operational and reputational risks to the organization.