ING Vysya's IT Plan For 2010

ING Vysya Life Insurance has achieved 24 percent growth in total premium income in the fiscal year 2008-2009 by collecting Rs1,442 crore from customers. The company’s assets under management (AuM) have shown a healthy growth of 32 percent and are at over Rs 2,600 crore today. The company is gearing itself to support a period of sustained growth that will ride on the IT initiatives planned for 2010. Biztech2.0 exclusively spoke to S Ravishankar, director-IT & Corporate Services to get a sneak peek into these initiatives.

In the next year, IT at ING Life will enable higher efficiencies across all channels. “In the case of our tied agency workforce, we are in the process of implementing work-ways that will enable the company’s vast sales force to sell insurance using a consistent and proven approach that is tracked and measured through the sales process,” says Ravishankar.

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“We are in the process of implementing computerised systems for our alternate channel partners, who sell our insurance policies from their locations. There are various co-operative banks along with Independent Vendor Bank (IVB) branches that sell ING Life’s insurance policies. We are working on meeting the challenge to provide actionable information to these partners in a timely and cost-effective manner. In order to meet this end we plan to upgrade our portals and make them available on mobile phones in the coming year,” he further elaborates.

The company will also be concentrating on further strengthening and improving its disaster recovery sites to face the possible risks that could emerge in the current threat landscape.

As storage is also an integral part of the IT environment, a decision has been taken for adopting Ethernet storage.

“A decision has already been taken to go in for Ethernet technology and it will be a part of our IT environment in less than a year,” says Ravishankar. The company is in the process of upgrading its SAN also. Given the current and projected growth rate of the company, Ethernet storage technology is coming in at the right time for this insurance player.

Ravishankar says, “Storage is very important in the life insurance sector as each provider enters into a long-term contract with each customer. We are posting a 20-30 percent annual growth. The data is humongous and retrieval becomes an issue in a semi-offline mode. The customer cannot be asked to wait in case of data queries. Thus, IP is the way ahead for us.”