Life Insurance Corporation: Adding Life to Insurance

Business Challenges: With assets totalling Rs 240,00 crores and over 115

million policies to manage, Life Insurance Corporation has one of the largest

customer records in the world. Its 123,000 salaried employees and 800,000

commissioned employees, dispersed among its 2,048 branches nationwide, would

find it impossible to coordinate and work together without a robust

communication system and IT infrastructure. The number of transactions through

LIC offices exceeds a million a day, including about 500x2,048 policy

transactions and a half a million towards payment against commissions, loans and

payouts, reveals managing director A Ramamurthy.

The IT approach: The company attributes its growth during the last few years

to its ITinitiative. Although LIC was among the first few to initiate the use of

IT in as early as 1965, it was only during the 1990s that it became particularly

aggressive in its approach. During the last five years, LIC has been spending an

average of Rs 60 crore per year on IT and the total investment so far is about

Rs 300 crore. LIC managed to complete the installation of a local area network

in all 2,048 branches in three years.

Benefits: LIC has also implemented front-end operations and offers an online

service. The online service offers mmediate policy status reports, prompt

acceptance of their premium, get revival quotations and loan quotations on

demand. Faster processing and greater accuracy has resulted in substantial

satisfaction with the LIC agents. This year, it is planning to spend Rs 100

crore on IT to further enhance its services.