3G is helping insurers reach out to untapped markets

Bajaj Allianz is one of the fastest growing insurance players to have pan-India presence. How are you planning to use ICT for enabling your business?

Communication within the organization uses telecom extensively. Each of our 1,100+ offices across the country have been enabled with a video-conferencing facility, thereby reducing the cost and logistical issues of physical travel. Further, IT has enabled us to reduce the turn-around-time (TAT) for issuing policies to our customers. This has been possible by using image based processing as an alternative to manual processes involving physical movement of papers.

IT and Telecom are key enablers to our business and are crucial for each of our stakeholders. Telecom serves as the backbone on which IT infrastructure and applications are driven.

For instance, Telecom and IT collectively enable agents and distributors to respond to customers' requirements on a real-time basis without having to visit a physical office, as information is available at their fingertips. This is enabled through a unique mobile application that allows the sales team to access information on products, targets, achievements, etc, on their mobile handsets. We have also implemented an e-learning portal for future agents called Bima Jyoti, which is an online platform for pre-licensing training. This portal works on a basic internet connection, thereby making it easily accessible and available to maximum number of people.

In a nutshell, IT and telecom make it possible to conduct our business in an efficient and more effective manner.

What are your Investment plans for technical upgradations? Any in the pipeline?

As the business grows, we constantly ramp up our IT infrastructure and services to meet the increased requirement. We are adopting the latest technologies available in the market that would help us run the business better.

What are your key network challenges? How do you address them?

Maintaining an optimum uptime for the business is a challenge, due to the dependence on fiber optics. To address this challenge, we are looking at using 3G and VSAT technologies extensively as backups. Value Added Services such as managed services or security consulting remain a challenge. Billing plans offered by service providers today usually offer fixed plans for telecom usage. There is a need for these billing plans to be made flexible depending on variable usage during different times of the day and month. Availability of telecom infrastructure in rural areas is limited and restricted. As a result, reaching a rural population is difficult. To address this challenge, we depend on multiple operators through which we can reach out to various parts of the country.

How do you think new technologies like 3G and WiMAX will help your business needs?

One of the biggest limitations faced by the network today is bandwidth. New technologies such as 3G will break that barrier making data available in more ways than we can think of today. Some of the advantages we see of implementing 3G are increased usage of multimedia and reaching out to offices in remote locations. 3G is making IT accessible to even remote locations, which is helping insurers to reach out to a larger population and penetrate into currently untapped markets. Currently many locations face an issue of bandwidth, causing delays in policy issuance and other operations. 3G would enable them to handle large volumes more efficiently. Communication through video would help insurers provide more personalized service to the customer, in comparison to a telephonic conversation.

With 3G, applications used for commercial purposes can be made easily accessible at home through basic telecom and IT infrastructure. This would also enable insurers to reach out to housewives who can work as insurance agents from the comfort of their homes.

What are your demands regarding QoS provided by the communication service providers?

The Quality of Service provided by communication service providers currently is restricted to the ends of the network. There is a need, however, to improve QoS in the cloud as well, which currently no service provider offers.

What are the green initiatives undertaken by Bajaj Allianz?

We have undertaken server virtualization extensively to reduce carbon footprint. Old servers have been replaced by more power-efficient servers, which have reduced the power consumption by 40-50%. Further, low power consumption routers and CPUs have been installed across the organization. Network and storage virtualization has also been undertaken as part of the green initiatives.

Akanksha Singh
akankshas@cybermedia.co.in