ING Vysya Life Insurance Uses FileNet's Solution
By Bijay Shankar Patel
New Delhi, Oct 5, 2007

ING Vysya Life Insurance Company entered the private life insurance industry in India in 2001. Headquartered in Bangalore, it has 140 branches across 74 cities and a customer base of over 4,50,000. It distributes products in close cooperation with the ING Vysya Bank network.

The company had procured FileNet P8 system in early 2005 for document management, imaging, and workflow applications in critical customer-focused functions - such as processing the new business proposals and servicing the existing policies.

The company staff was used to processing the insurance applications manually. Rapid growth in business resulted in rise in the amount of paperwork, which made manual work difficult. Physical handling of the documents by large number of people led to the risk of misplacing them. Another potent problem was low productivity.

The company zeroed in on FileNet, as its application was strong in both content management and workflow. Other contenders were IBM content manager and Staffware.

The implementation for the processing of new business insurance proposals was completed in 6 months and went online on November 2005. Since then the company has successfully implemented the systems in the area of servicing existing customers also.

"The company is now able to meet a number of business challenges, such as, diseconomy of complexity, seasonal peaks in business, and launch of new insurance products in a dynamic, vibrant, and expanding market place," stated Ravishankar Subramanian, vice president (IT) of ING Vysya Life Insurance.

The implementation strategy was to derive quick benefits in a short period of time. The company thus chose to integrate content management with the existing transaction processing systems at the data level only. Application level integration wasn't targeted due to the complexities in technology and possible longer period of implementation.

The biggest challenge faced in this project was documentation of the process by which the customer services department processed new applications. Another hurdle was the lack of adequate knowledge and support from the local partners of FileNet. Hence, the company approached FileNet to directly provide the required maintenance and support.

The basic features of the new solutions are imaging and storage of paper documents in electronic format, and retrieval of these documents based on criteria such as document type and policy number/customer number. It also features 'Guided Data Entry', wherein the section of a document that's relevant to the field being entered is automatically zoomed into on the electronic document. This greatly eases and improves productivity of data entry staff. Besides, it contains rules based and automated routing of work depending on the skills required to process each insurance application.

"The solution has enabled the company to achieve a predictable turnaround of proposals. Resource planning and transparency to the sales department and end customers have improved", states Subramanian.

The application of IT has enabled the company to achieve its ambitious targets and plans for future growth. The annual IT expenditure has been over Rs. 25 crore. Technology is being used in various customer facing interactions by using tools such as employee and advisor portals, automated and rules-based messaging, and payment gateways. All this has been achieved while ensuring that customers' data is protected in accordance to stringent international standard.

The company is planning to implement much of the employee-related processes on the FileNet platform next year. It's all set to launch a customer portal built on IBM's Websphere.

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