Aegon Religare kick-started its India operations in August 2008 with the objective of carving a niche for itself in the fiercely-competitive life insurance space. Having initiated its services with just 25 branches, the company soon had 50 branches under its wings in a mere span of five months.

Start-Up Requirements

Srinivas Iyengar, director, IT and Change Management, Aegon Religare, says, "Somewhere in the month of December of 2007, we were in the process of evaluating a product that could take care of our portal needs as well as the sales management system. With regard to our portal requirements, we wanted to cover the agency management portal as well as the customer portal, as our intent from the beginning was to ensure that we would be able to offer the portal services to both the customer and the agent, right from the day we went live."

The second aspect was related to the sales management system. Aegon Religare wanted to automate the entire sales management process and the agency hiring process. The company wanted to bring in a system that could not only automate and scale the agency sales management process but also help generate real-time reports and analysis in order to make the whole agency selection and on-boarding a more accurate experience.

Integration of Apps: Primary challenge

Despite not having to deal with the woes of legacy systems, Aegon Religare was finding it difficult to narrow down on a solution that would not only help to improve business performance but also integrate the various applications with the back-end core systems.

Cordys: The Right Ingredient

After having evaluated a string of vendors, Aegon Religare felt that Cordys had just the right recipe that the company required to achieve its vision. Let us see which features of Cordys helped propel this tie-up.

Iyengar says, "Our requirement was that the system should have the facility to design a workflow and escalation management procedure. The workflow component was compulsory. The second factor was the ability to build a new system at a fast pace. A portal is normally very dynamic; things keep changing frequently, hence, it was necessary to ensure that the platform on which it was built was scalable and flexible. Cordys fit the bill well. The third factor was integration with other systems in an efficient manner. We could do this using Cordys, either in the way of Web services, XML or by just integrating with their existing platforms. The most relevant feature for us was the ability to use Cordys and develop systems at a much faster pace."

"Just to give an example, when we launched the portal, the original portal was expected to take close to three-and-a-half months just for the development cycle; whereas, by using Cordys, we could shrink this timeframe to just 16 days, right from scoping till the UAT was signed by the business users. That made a big difference in terms of the ability to get to market much faster without having to compromise on the functionalities that we were expecting from the system."

Functionalities of Cordys

Cordys had three major components that fit well into Aegon Religare’s requirement map. The first among this was the rapid application development toolkit, which helps the technical person to develop the required set of codes at a much faster pace than the earlier architecture. The second component was the enterprise service bus, which enables Cordys to be used as a platform, portraying it as a single, front-end interface to the customer or business users and yet, at the same time, allows it to talk to multiple systems in the back-end in a seamless manner, without having to go in for an expensive integration effort. The third component was the BPM or workflow component, which Iyengar feels is the single best component within Cordys. The BPM component is laden with complete workflow management capabilities that can be used to build escalations as well as routing. It also ensures capture of logs of time of communication from one user to another.

Smooth Implementation

As Cordys began to work its magic at Aegon Reliagre, the company discovered that the implementation was turning out to be a breeze. Let us see how this phase went at the life insurance firm.

Iyengar says, "We started the implementation around the first week of January with the portal, which had two sub-components (agency and customer portal). The second phase dealt with the sales management system. The original timeline that we envisaged was around four-and-a-half months. What we found out during the scoping and initial implementation was that we could deploy both these systems within three months."

Benefits

RoI visibility, reduced time and headcount are just a few of the benefits that Cordys brought to the table for Aegon Religare.

According to Iyengar, the first benefit that Aegon Religare realised with this implementation was RoI visibility. "With our cash collection system, we could actually save two hours daily per customer service executive at the branch. The sales management system gave us an RoI in the form of reduced headcount. On the customer service front and the agency support front, by using the portal, we could reduce the number of calls. We have also been able to build a set of systems, which complete our bouquet of peripheral systems, such as the cash collection system, the global incidence management system etc," concludes Iyengar.