Safe Guarding Life Insurance

A Fortune 100 global insurance company (reluctant to reveal its identity) based in the U.S. had an in-house IT team responsible for the management of several IT applications, which handled its life-insurance business. For the company with 150 years of experience of providing a wide array of banking, insurance and asset-management services in over 50 countries with over 120,000 employees who serve a broad customer base — individuals, families, small businesses, large corporations, institutions and governments — it was difficult to manage the internal IT requirements and to run its growing global business. Moreover, the company was using old technology to manage its gigantic insurance business. “We did an analysis of the work being done and determined that it was using old technology, had many repeatable tasks, which were not core to the business we do. We were mainly facing work capacity problems in terms of training and hiring new people and the transition of a business from the West coast to the East coast,” said the company’s spokesperson.

At the same time, being a leading provider of retirement services and life insurance in the U.S. and a top property and casualty insurer in Canada, it was necessary for the company to maintain, and gear up, its position in the market. With the massively growing business and rapidly increasing competition, it was necessary to explore the new business model. Thus, the conglomerate evaluated the options of outsourcing the IT applications, since the existing team was unable to meet the increasingly stiff service-level agreements driven by the changing nature of the business and increased competition.

Between 2002 and 2003: The company opted for multisourcing model of offshoring and outsourced a big chunk of its IT services to its one of the prime contractors NIIT Technologies, an India-based technology company. The provider set up a dedicated offshore development center to handle all the applications for the customer’s life insurance business.

The contract was no less challenging for NIIT. “Availability of resources with skills in the customer’s technology area was scarce — in the market and within the organization. We overcame these challenges through our knowledge-management and competency-development frameworks,” said Ritu Gupta, Practice Leader, BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) Vertical, NIIT Technologies.