Edelweiss General Insurance’s strategy towards becoming a cloud-native company

Technology has become all pervasive and the interconnected lifestyles of consumers is driving a paradigm shift across financial services. While insurance joined the party late, the pace of change has now accelerated. The base of digitally connected customers is growing rapidly and that provides companies like Edelweiss General Insurance the opportunity to redefine and transform experiences.

In today’s age of instant gratification, technology has enabled new business models through instant and seamless engagement with customers.

“Product constructs are being defined by the contextual needs of consumers. We are a cloud native organization with a digital operating model which centers on innovation. With this we seek to provide tangible and meaningful value to customers through simple and hassle free experiences.We are looking to create a platform that extends beyond transactional selling, renewing or payment of claims, and are more focused on engaging and integrating closely with our customers’ lives,” Shanai Ghosh, ED & CEO, Edelweiss General Insurance said in an interview with ETCIO.

Edited Excerpts:

As you mentioned that Edelweiss General Insurance is a cloud-native organisation, What are the business imperatives of migrating core applications on cloud?

We are proud to be a cloud-native company. Our usage of Amazon cloud to host our entire application portfolio, was a concerted step taken in line with our digital operating model that required an open architecture that was both flexible and agile.

Being cloud native also allowed us access to multiple marketplace tools etc., which further helped in augmenting our data storage, processing and analytical capabilities. It also helped us save on capex requirements and ensured effective capacity management of our IT infrastructure. The flexibility of pay-per-use models enabled significant cost savings for a young company like us.

Your company is among the few insurance organisations in South-East Asia to have hosted the entire application portfolio on cloud. What is the strategy behind taking such a critical business decision?

We have hosted not only our entire application portfolio,but the security console is also on cloud. It was a challenging decision from the investment phase. Though, the migration was successful, and today we can see a number of benefits.Apart from various other benefits, the foremost one is that today, we can control the IT Infrastructure cost in a highly efficient manner based on evolving business requirements. Strong processes are in place to provision or de-provision infrastructure resources, based on business requirements in minimum time.

Having decided to be cloud native at the very beginning meant that we did not have to face usual migration related concerns. However, there were challenges in adoption which were more related to aligning other aspects of our tech architecture, with the objective of building a robust and future ready operating model. While there are many benefits to cloud adoption, it is a long-term decision which needs to be taken with a holistic view of digital initiatives and business considerations of future growth.

Which technologies are helping you to streamline data driven processes in the company? What are your initiatives towards maintaining data accuracy?

We are constantly looking at opportunities of digital enablement for all our business processes. We are extensively leveraging emerging technologies to enhance the efficiency of our execution engine. This is critical as we take a customer centric view when delivering our solutions.

As a strategy, we have implemented SAP S4 Hana as our common database for all applications that provides unified dissemination of information. We have employed RPA to automate routine processes and help avoid human errors. We are also embedding strong governance in rule engines of our ETL systems, to ensure data validation at all levels and plugging of any gaps by building maker checkers in all critical areas. We are investing in data modelling and analytics capabilities, to enable personalisation at scale. This forces us to ensure high levels of data integrity. Our use-case driven approach requires us to think backwards from desired business outcomes, to get the relevant data to ensure delivery. We take data integrity very seriously and have built layers of checks and balances across our data value chain, to ensure accuracy and completeness of data.

Edelweiss General Insurance is also recognized as the only insurance organization in the industry to successfully implement SAP as the core technology platform. How are you measuring the ROI post-adopting SAP?

SAP implementation was one of the first milestones of our organization – which eventually paved the way for setting up exciting new business with a robust business model and defining our unique customer proposition with service differentiators.

The hallmark of the project is the adoption of end-to-end SAP application software, to cater to all aspects of the company’s activities. It has been a major business decision for us and has helped us significantly in managing data throughout the “quote-to-report” cycle. Apart from this, SAP gives us a reporting and analytics platform and a scalable database structure to fulfill any future requirements of advanced analytics including AI, ML & Process Orchestration, for smooth integration with external ecosystems.

The seamless and modular nature of the stack helps bundling and unbundling of components to enable newer differentiated offerings, which can be launched at a much faster pace. The SAP HANA database acts as a central repository for all data sources in the company. Even data layers that are beyond the scope of SAP S/4 HANA, are integrated and pooled into the HANA database. This provides a single source of truth, mitigating data integrity challenges.

Adopting SAP has streamlined our reporting needs given its ability to provide a logical view of transactions. SAP also enables a micro-services-based tech architecture which allows easy integration with multiple third-party systems.

What is the company’s growing-digital strategy?

Consistently improving customer experiences forms the core of our business strategy. Technology will continue to play a significant role in the emerging business dynamics. We recognize this and that the fast-paced evolution of technology, requires a very open and flexible architecture. Hence, we have consciously invested in building a robust digital operating model.

This requires our tech strategy to be tightly integrated with business strategy to drive the agenda of innovation. Our endeavors in implementing SAP suite, cloud adoption, microservices-enabled API architecture etc., reflect our emphasis on ensuring delivery of superlative customer experiences. Our architecture envisages a robust core, agile middle-ware and feature rich fronted assets, which will be key drivers for our overall strategy.

We are leveraging technology to help us deliver innovation in product, service and distribution and for new age communication channels to target our choice of segments. We are constantly evaluating trending behaviour and are quick to marry them with relevant technologies like Voice Integration or Smart device integration, to extend a seamless customer experience.

Source: The Economic Times