Top US insurer sees a 338% surge in online premium for its personal line of products in just 2 years by rolling out direct channels for policy sales

Client background

The company, one of the Fortune 500, is a leading US-based property and casualty insurer. With an employee strength of more than 30,000, the insurance behemoth provides retirement plans, personal as well as business policies which cover home insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, insurance for agribusinesses, etc. It has operations across the US and sells insurance through its subsidiaries.

Industry landscape

While the insurance companies are embarking on a digital transformation journey, they are also looking to expand within the country and whittle down localization of their businesses to ramp up their top line. The effort has been to open up direct channels of their own. 

The opportunity

The client wanted to move away from legacy applications that were slowing down and making its processes inefficient. It’s auto insurance sales, for instance, was driven by exclusive agents who were predominantly using legacy applications. These were leading to a loss of sales opportunities as the time taken on quotes was becoming way too long. The company wanted to open up online channels to drive growth, starting with the auto insurance part of the business.

The need of the hour was also to provide online self-service capability to bring down service centre costs while improving customer experience. 

The company wanted to expand direct sales channels to new geographies with new products to improve revenue growth.

The insurer was looking to create a digital platform for consistent product implementation, rates, data across multiple channels and define an architecture to improve business agility and time-to-market.

The solution

Wipro partnered with the client to open up more direct channels for policy sales and, in particular, offered an end-to-end solution (J2EE platform) for the auto insurance sales and servicing expansion program. We also formed a core shared services team to own and maintain components/technical modules across multiple channels.

The solution enabled:

• Transformation of the architecture from a multi-channel to a layered application architecture, thereby creating a go-forward platform for direct sales and servicing
• Creation of separate presentation tier for each channel with channel-specific UI, navigation and variability
• Easier and faster configuration of multi-state rollouts through custom rules and UI
• Addition of products and features such as rules framework, metadata framework; provided seamless switch between related products
• Opening up of direct channels for expansion of the auto insurance business; phased out non-strategic auto insurance sales applications and consolidation into a single sales platform
• Usage of V-process model with a blend of distributed agile systems and client’s ESDM in an iterative fashion
  

The online sales process was initially rolled out in one state with standard and non-standard products that established our base code, then implemented across several other states.

Business impact

Spurt in Sales of Personal Line of Products - Standard and Speciality

• 338% jump in online premium in 2 years State-level Sales Improvement
• Sales and servicing Internet applications rolled out across 19 states over 18 months
• 112% jump in sales in Georgia and 220% in Maryland post rollout Time to Market
• 7 of the top 10 states on J2EE platforms

The “Key Note” Rankings

• Jumped to No. 3 position globally from No. 9 in little over a year

Time Improvement

• Elapsed time to get online quote: from 15 minutes to 9 minutes in little over a year, indicating a 40% reduction in time
• Elapsed time to 1000 online binds: from 525 days to just 15 days in about 36 months, indicating a 97% reduction in time