HCL Brings Deep Insurance Domain Knowledge and Workforce Certifications to Clients’ Migration Projects

HCL (www.hcltech.com) has been transforming technology into competitive advantage for leading financial services companies around the world through the efforts of their financial services practice built on domain competencies spanning retail and corporate banking, capital markets, and insurance.

Catering to the IT and operational needs of some of the largest financial services organizations in the world, HCL, explains Prasanna Satpathy, senior vice president of their banking, financial services and insurance group, has used their contemporary transition methodology, ARMOR™, for the migration of more than 200 processes and 120 projects involving over 4000 associates over the last five years.

WFS: Prasanna, we hear that most major global services providers are investing in domain knowledge. How is HCL different in this respect?

PS: We are integrated across insurance, assets and investment management, banking and other financial services. These are not separate practices with separate front-end and back-end silos within HCL. What is different is that they are under one integrated organization equipped to serve customers across all these financial services areas. As you know, many so-called ‘insurance’ companies are repositioning as ‘financial services’ companies with a wider range of products and services. They want to integrate their IT efforts spread across the lines of businesses and obtain synergies to wring out costs.

HCL is also one of the very few leading vendors with a true leadership position in all the major areas of IT and IT-enabled services – from applications development and management, to infrastructure support, BPO/KPO and consulting for enterprise transformation. Today’s CIOs and CTOs want much more beyond improvements on costs, time and quality. With our deep-rooted experience of integrated services, we offer the ability to significantly re-engineer and optimize their business processes.

WFS: Your global insurance practice offers business-driven technology solutions. What prompted HCL to develop this vertical practice?

PS: Domain knowledge is critical in value-added execution of any project without compromising in functionality. Using this guiding principle, we created two Insurance Solutions Development Centers to bring in business perspective to projects. Built on a foundation of insurance domain expertise, proven technology and a heritage of successful deployments, the practice helps customers identify and build IT solutions to achieve business objectives. With a corporate policy of having at least 50% of the practice qualified in insurance domain certification, more of our staff are undertaking certifications and are under various stages of the certification process.

WFS: Let’s discuss one of your recent client migrations dealing with policy administration. What was your client seeking to accomplish?

PS: Our client’s system managed 80-plus different products, related to universal variable life policies. A complex system, it interfaced with financial applications, payouts, reporting and intermediary systems internally. There was also a centralized customer database.

Our client needed to improve efficiency in operations like sales and marketing, policy administration, intermediaries and correspondence processes. They also wanted to provide transparency to customers and intermediaries by sending customer-friendly communications, enhance life insurance sales to support product features already being marketed and gain the enhanced ability to quickly modify IT systems in response to regulatory changes and government policies.

WFS: What was HCL’s role and what mainframe technologies were used?

PS: The client was responsible for delivering a collection of functional designs in a mutually agreeable template. Using these functional designs, HCL was responsible for the technical design, coding and unit testing and system testing. The mainframe technologies used were Z/OS, DB2, COBOL XPEDITOR and CICS.

WFS: What benefits were targeted?

PS: Five in all. Consolidation of business systems as envisaged in the IT blueprint and restructuring. The ability to shorten the time required to make a product available to market. Enhanced efficiency in operations. More transparent operations from the customers’ angle. And as I said earlier, quickly modify IT systems in response to regulatory changes.