How Red Hat helped Bajaj Allianz deal with online surge

NEW DELHI:

Red Hat

is helping digitally transform

Bajaj Allianz Life

in ways that are enabling the latter to deal with customers far more efficiently. The change proved to be particularly useful during the pandemic, when online interactions surged.


While the front-end transformation is complete, the back-end transformation of legacy infrastructure is expected to be complete by this year-end.

Legacy systems invariably throw challenges of scalability and ability to integrate with external systems.

Bajaj Allianz

Life is overcoming these challenges by moving from on-premise servers to cloudborne systems.

“The big problem with legacy infrastructure is it does not change, does not allow you to integrate with others, and it is not scalable. The core transformation project is going on for the last 18 months,” says Goutam Dutta, chief information and digital officer at

Bajaj

Allianz Life.

In February last year, the new system enabled the insurer to launch a customer bot on WhatsApp through which it was able to service almost 20 different operations including providing policy details, payment schedules and other service requests.

While that was just before the pandemic, the upcoming months of lockdown led to a surge in the usage of this service, with about 8 lakh unique customers using this till December. Without the cloud and the new systems, this would have been impossible to deal with.

“We have also come up with a Smart Assist feature, where we actually share the screen with a customer while filling up the details,” says Dutta.

The new platform also helps the insurer make its applications available 24/7 across its digital touch-points, including INSTab (a point-of-sale tool), Boing chatbot and i-Serv video-based chat solution, enabling it to quickly address customer queries.

A lot of these features were enabled by using Red Hat OpenShift, Enterprise Linux, 3Scale API Management, Runtimes and Directory Server. OpenShift is an enterpriseready Kubernetes container platform to manage hybrid cloud deployments.

Bajaj Allianz Life’s new core platform has shortened the time taken from ideation to deployment of new products and services from 6-9 months to less than a month, and helped issue policies in one day instead of three or more days.

“In the previous waterfall model of software development, it takes almost 90 days to just develop a product, depending on the complexity of the project. We helped create a more agile model, using devops and microservices,” says Marshal Correia, vice president and general manager (India & south east Asia) at Red Hat.

Correia says consumers today want insurance providers and others to provide experiences like the ones they get from an e-commerce or FMCG app. “That is why such companies need to be agile,” he says.