We have created native data platform as a single source of truth: Max Life’s Suhail Ghai

Max Life Insurance, the fifth largest private life insurer in the country, has embraced digital transformation initiatives with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and data engineering to scale up further, according to Suhail Ghai, the chief digital and information officer (CDIO). In an interview with TechCircle, Ghai spoke about technology innovation at Max Life Insurance, the menace of incessant customer calls, and responsibility as an important data fiduciary:

Before joining Max Life Insurance, you worked in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. How different are the two industries in terms of technology adoption and digitisation?

The biggest change for me moving from consumer goods to our BFSI is the business model. While CPG is mostly B2B In India, BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) operates in a B2B2C or B2C environment. This is a major distinction that decides what kind of strategies we adopt. Secondly, in CPG we are usually dealing with physical goods so digitisation can play only a certain part, whereas, for service industries like BFSI, there is a much larger scope. Lastly, the kind of data we have on consumers in BFSI puts a big responsibility on us as a data fiduciary to safeguard and make sure it is only available on a need-to-know basis.

What are the technology innovation and digital transformation efforts being taken at Max Life Insurance?

While digital transformation started even before the COVID era, it really picked pace in post-COVID. One big area of change was the greater acceptance of the do-it-yourself (DIY) model by the customers. We saw a surge in the number of customers willing to buy online which led us to invest more in our D2C platforms and the online business. We currently have the industry-leading metrics on entire funnel conversion. 

For customer onboarding, we leverage the government stack like electronic-know-your-customer (eKYC) or video KYC (vKYC).  We are reducing data entry by getting more and more data through financial bureaus, due to which we are able to optimise the onboarding journeys, and many of these processes are now sub-10-minute. Today for 50% of our offer policies in certain large segments, we are able to instant issuance (within minutes) against the earlier 10-20 hours timeframe. 

Customer servicing is also a big area for us. We are working on an omnichannel model for customer services,  bringing together all touch points and enabling a uniform experience. For instance, we have implemented a new age dialer on the cloud, which is intelligent and integrated into our common data foundation. From 50%, today our customer service transaction digitisation level has increased to more than 85%. We are also working with fintech players which has given us industry-leading success rates on payments and payment experience.

We have also worked extensively on distribution digitization and we sell through many channels. We have implemented new-age lead management systems and activity management systems to digitise our salesforce so that they can be far more productive. Lastly, on our employee side, we've been implementing a new-age human resources information system (HRIS) system and more bots to make the day in the life of our employees easier. Overall, it's a 360-degree approach to digital transformation.

Speaking more about customer servicing, there is a common complaint regarding incessant calls and messages from insurance companies. How are you leveraging technology to make sure customers do not face such inconvenience?

We are working on two modes with the customer. First, we are creating assets where customers can get their own information. To this end, we have launched a multi-lingual support chatbot called Mili. It can be accessed through the WhatsApp interface. Customers can ask Mili any question and the bot would be able to fulfil the information needs in nine different languages. It can also perform other tasks like downloading statements and sending reminders. 

We are also in the process of implementing our customer communication engine and building analytics of the customers' habits. Based on this data, over a period of time, we expect to be very sharp with our customers in terms of understanding the way they want us to reach out to them. Additionally, we are constantly working with our communications team to make up communication crisp and also to optimise this based on customer feedback. So that we are not over-communicating.

How do you leverage data to make your operations smoother and more effective? What are the ways in which you ensure that such data remains safe?

Like any other insurer, traditionally our data was on-premise. Today we have built a new data foundation which is based on lake house architecture, where we have created a native data platform that is able to act as a single source of truth for all kinds of data needs. The data availability has been changed from end of the day to near real-time. We are also using the same data to fuel our API in our integration with the third party. This data also helps to seamlessly integrate with non-structured data like Google Analytics so that we are able to understand our customers better.

In terms of data risks and security, I would say they are consistent with any financial services organisation. So, we have implemented steps like penetration testing, data encryption, anti-ransomware framework creation, and policies for perimeter security, to ensure that access to this data is really limited. Since we work with third-party processors, we make sure that these rules apply to the extended ecosystem as well.