We are witnessing automation gaining momentum in the industry: Shriram General Insurance

The insurance industry has begun to rely more and more on online customer service. With the implementation of new technology and InsurTech capabilities, insurers can alter how they work with brokers and approach policyholders by providing customised solutions and a better customer experience.

Core technological trends have emerged over the last few years and are now impacting almost every business. Products and services are changing as a result of several technological breakthroughs and changes.

We spoke to Himanshu Upadhyay, Head -Digital, Shriram General Insurance Company Limited, how they are integrating customer experience into IT deliverables and more. Excerpts from an interview:

Himanshu Upadhyay, Head -Digital, Shriram General Insurance Company Limited, tells more:

DQ: How has been your company performing over 2021 and 2022? Elaborate.

Himanshu: Early this year, the US private equity firm KKR became a part of Shriram General Insurance Company by acquiring a 9.9 per cent stake in our business.  SGIC wrote 17.5 lakh new policies during the first half of the current fiscal year H1FY23 - an up of 27% from H1FY22.

The company posted a net profit of Rs 280.89 crore during the same period of the previous fiscal year. There was a degrowth of 35 percent for the company as the industry was impacted in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. This year we are growing by 27 per cent.

However, the company has performed better than the industry average. We have recruited 700 employees this year and will recruit 300 more employees by March 2023, taking the employee count to 3,460 from 2,766. Besides, we have also expanded our operations by increasing the branches to 223 in H1FY23 from 202 last year period.

We are amongst the most profitable insurers having returned Rs 2,143 crore in dividends to the promoters for an investment of Rs 259 crore.

DQ: How are you integrating customer experience into IT deliverables? How is it helping in advanced customer experience?

Himanshu: We are increasing our focus on digitalization and as a result SGI is reaching out to its customers on different digital platforms like the Web, E-mail, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and WhatsApp for Business. 

Shriram General Insurance continues its technology adoption journey by constantly leveraging robust technologies across the customer acquisition – starting from seamless onboarding of customer to offering elevated customer experience 

We have recently revamped the product journeys for motorized two-wheelers and private car insurance on our website to simplify the buying process for our customers. Digitalization has paved way for a quick and effortless purchase of policies online. 

SGICL will launch its new web portal in January 2023. The new portal is built on the concept of Headless Architecture, with a lot of self-service tools for our customers.

We have adopted a customer–centric approach and deliver 10X value for them throughout their journey with us . Our single focus is on efficient data management - from acquisition to engagement and servicing and detecting fraud.

DQ: How are you managing growing cybersecurity, and data privacy threats?

Himanshu: We have web application firewalls enabled across our web- enabled application interfaces. Firewall, threat protection and data loss prevention tools are implemented and monitored on regular basis across all the application platforms. Additionally, we regularly conduct vulnerability and penetration assessment reporting to ensure compliance with the findings & standards.

We organize Cyber Security Awareness campaigns quite often through channels like Whatsapp, SMS, Emails, and run it on our website too to ensure it reaches our teams across our operations. This measure is to ensure that we are vigilant of the prevailing security thefts /breach and stand immune to such threats and attacks. 

We recently conducted a cyber security awareness quiz competition for our employees across our PAN India operations and recognized the “Cyber Veers”.  This was held on the side lines of the nationwide 'Cyber Jaagrookta Diwas' initiative by the Indian Government to create awareness and sensitize Internet users on safeguarding against cyber frauds and cyber crimes.

DQ: How are CTOs and CIOs seeing advancing organizational use of data as key to reaching enterprise objectives?

Himanshu: We are implementing Behavioural data science that involves intelligent customer data platforms to understand the customers better and faster. We also put to use disruptive technologies such as the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, speech recognition tech, data mining on multiple source data, and audience segmentation to serve this purpose.

We are witnessing automation gaining momentum in the industry, and expecting this to get multifolded in the future, but there are a lot of areas that are still to be brought onboard towards automation. 

Our focus on agile technology architecture, strong API-based back-ends adopting technologies AI, ML, RPA, and business IT design thinking will be the game changer for us in the coming years.

We are aggressively working on empowering our service channels and applications with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. An instant and seamless policy issuance process is functional and available for customers & intermediaries. Claim settlement through mobile app has been implemented in a few zones and categories, which will be soon rolled out across all categories of our PAN India operations. 

 Our objective is to serve the underserved and this is achievable through a dedicated and technologically equipped team of innovators, who constantly put in the effort to inculcate trending technology , invent ancillary applications  and enhance   the existing ones .

DQ: How are you maturing the enterprise cloud strategy?

Himanshu: Our core systems run on a Private cloud, which is hosted on-on premise to handle multiple applications of Shriram General Insurance.  With the ease of deployment, the Private cloud can share resources across applications.

Our Private cloud is stabilized and we are on the verge of enabling the Public cloud. With businesses fast embracing digitalization, there is a growing demand for agile technologies and the Public cloud  fulfils this demand  with  its  unparalleled disaster management and inbuilt recovery mechanisms that support business continuity. We are exploring and depending on these applications when there is uncertainty by means of non availability of human resources, natural calamities etc. 

As we have a Private cloud and planning for Public cloud in place, we are  also exploring possibilities  to  enable a hybrid cloud that  combines the on-premise -Private cloud and off-premise Public cloud . This will  allow data movement between two different environments.We believe the Hybrid cloud will help us achieve major objectives like bringing down the cost, offering control ,scalability and  flexibility, and ease of management.

DQ: How is the digital adoption and employee training in your company? 

Himanshu: We use collaboration tools that help our employees stay connected and collaborate seamlessly. We are early movers in the industry in terms of mobility adaptation and digitalization of most of our operations.

For achieving employee and intermediaries’ learning goals we put to use  the  web and mobile-based applications for audio-visual training, self-assessments, etc. 

DQ: What will be the trends in 2023?

Himanshu: With digital  advancement in the Indian insurance industry such as the mandatory KYC, Bima Sugam portal, etc., we witness an upheaved digital adaptation that is expected to expedite especially in customer servicing technologies, digital collaboration tools, remote signing, and new-age innovative digital products.

Distributed infrastructure, Digital transformation, RPA & Automation will continue to dominate / trend in the insurance industry. However, we expect Low/No Code Development to continue to gain traction and be implemented in more use cases as it can solve some burning issues faced by IT teams. They will be very helpful in reducing backlogs, improving productivity, and accelerating the  Go Live of applications.

During the last few years, Application Programming Interfaces have grown significantly and will continue to trend as it has opened up the possibilities for interconnecting multiple applications. The insurance industry is using APIs to provide real-time quotes to customers on various channels,  enabling chatbots and other digital customer service tools.

We have also implemented a few predictive analytics engines in our ongoing journey from analysis to analytics. Increased use of data analytics has helped us in the personalization of services and products to be provided to the customer and also in their pre-approvals.

With online interfaces and virtual claims adjusters, we also aim at an efficient claim settlement process while simultaneously decreasing the probability of fraud.