Globalisation: Choosing technology that fits your market
- 30 September, 2010 07:30
- Comments
Aegon Religare wants to grow its insurance sales in tandem with the salaries of a burgeoning middle class in India. The fastest way to do it, company executives determined last year, would be to sell policies on the Internet-a novel way to market insurance in that country.
Six months after launching the site last October, the life and health insurer sold more than 4,300 policies-about eight times what it had projected. Now it averages 1,000 online policy sales per month. "This is a niche channel for us, but it allows us to get more sales from a different segment of the population," says Srini Iyengar, director of IT and change management at Aegon Religare.
The company is a two-year-old joint venture of Aegon, an insurance firm in the Netherlands; Religare, a wealth-management company in India; and the Indian media powerhouse Bennett, Coleman. The online sales idea bubbled up during a strategy meeting of senior executives, including Iyengar, he says, and it puts Aegon Religare ahead of competitors that have yet to launch Internet businesses.
Hitting the New Sweet Spot
The company's new sweet spot is Indians ages 25 to 40 who are comfortable buying products and services on the Web and whose incomes are growing-a segment anyone selling anything in India wants to target, Iyengar says. Middle-class Indians, defined as those spending $2 to $20 per day, make up 25 percent of India's population, almost double the 1990 tally, according to the Asian Development Bank, which gives loans and advice to organizations working to decrease poverty in Asia.
Aegon Religare's site provides forms that customers can fill out to qualify for various policies-a process familiar to many U.S. consumers. They can also make payments and schedule required medical exams. On the back end, Aegon Religare uses business-process management software from Cordys to integrate website transactions with its existing mix of customer-relationship management and policy-administration systems. Aegon Religare was already using the Cordys Business Operations Platform to coordinate sales and procurement among its 25 offices throughout India.
One of the biggest issues Iyengar had to deal with was convincing the business units that although online was a new channel for sales, the IT to make it work still had to be integrated with existing systems. They wanted at first to make the look and feel much different, which would have added to maintenance and support costs over time, he says.
According to Aegon's surveys, online customers liked its prices, Iyengar says. Premiums for online policies are lower than the traditional ones because there are no agents' commissions built into the rates.
Cannibalizing existing business doesn't concern them, Iyengar adds, because the policies sold online aren't available through agents and vice versa. In fact, the workforce liked the idea even more after seeing how the new channel creates leads for Aegon agents to sell add-ons such as accident riders.
Follow Senior Editor Kim S. Nash on Twitter: @knash99.
Read more about business process management (bpm) in CIO's Business Process Management (BPM) Drilldown.
Related Articles
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.
- Bookmark this page
- Share this article
- Got more on this story? Email CIO
- Follow CIO on twitter
-
Spiceworks' free management software gets integrated MDM
-
Opinion: Why national e-health is not for everyone
-
Opinion: Why national e-health is not for everyone
-
Opinion: Why national e-health is not for everyone
-
Opinion: Why national e-health is not for everyone
-
Building a Better Mousetrap in Anti-Malware
This story is becoming frustratingly old. Cyber threats are continuously advancing in their adaptability speed, sophistication, and degree of stealthiness. At the same time, the exposed footprint is expanding. More business operations are moving online and end-user devices—corporate-issued and user-owned—are expanding in number and variety. A reasonable question asked by executives responsible for making decisions on their organisations’ security budgets is whether their money and resources are being spent wisely. Are their businesses buying and using the best mix of security technologies to meet their needs and obligations? Read on. -
Real-Time Protection Against Malware Infection
Malware is at such high levels (more than 60 million unique samples per year) that protecting an endpoint with traditional antivirus software, has become futile. More than 100,000 new types of malware are now released every day, and antivirus vendors are racing to add new protection features to try to keep their protection levels up. Read more. -
Leading Through Connections – Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study
IBM’s 2012 Global CEO study follows face-to-face discussions with more than 1,700 CEOs and senior public sector leaders from around the globe. The findings examine how CEOs are responding to the complexity of increasingly interconnected organisations, markets, societies and governments. For example, almost one-quarter of CEOs say their organisations operate below par in terms of driving value from data. CEOs have expressed frustration about their inability to capitalise on available information. This is because: “The time available to capture, interpret and act on information is getting shorter and shorter.” CEO, Chemicals and Petroleum, United States Given the need for deeper business insight, the best performing organisations are more adept at converting complex data into insights, and insights into action. Download Entire Report Now.
Get exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis. 
