Safe Horizon
General Insurance
S
afe Horizon General Insurance
was formed in 2018 after
amalgamation of two insurance
companies, one a healthcare focused
insurance company, Protect360,
started by healthcare major Noorani
Group and another a motor insurance
company, AutoProtect, promoted by
automotive major, Arc.
The company provides all general
insurance products including travel,
health, motor and property but is
strong in the above two verticals, where
it has a credible history. The company
had a successful merger. The core
insurance processes including product
planning, underwriting and claims
management still ran separately, but
the marketing and sales functions were
fully integrated.
To promote the travel insurance
product, the company had tied up last
year with three major travel portals,
who both bundle and separately resell
its products. It had planned a huge
campaign around that for the summer
vacation, with exciting competition
among the consumers.
The company had planned it, taking
into account the fact that the demand
for health insurance policies also surge
around March, thanks to many people
opting for them, to save tax under
Section 80(D) deductions allowed in
Income Tax Act.
March is also the time every year
when demand for health insurance
claims is one of the highest during the
entire year.
That is the time when COVID-19
©2020. CIO&Leader [Confidential: For private circulation only]
A Case Study
came with full force, leading to a
national lockdown. But even before
that, the company had started
anticipating the situation. But being the
most active month, it could not afford
to lose the momentum, especially after
the planned big foray into travel had
been severely impacted in the wake of
COVID-19.
A new generation, tech-led
company, Safe Horizon has led in tech
applications to business. It was the
first among the new general insurance
companies to appoint a Chief Digital
Officer and one of the first insurance
firms to go for cloud. Its customer
management and claim management
processes run on its own infrastructure
from two on-premise data centers
while one DR data center is hosted with
a third-party provider. It uses Microsoft
Azure for running its CRM, campaign
management and data analytics.
CIO Harish Mehta has initiated many
industry leading practices in digitalizing
the processes. It had a mobile app that
allowed customers to do most of the
transactions on it.
In the wake of COVID-19, the
company had to do everything virtually,
at a time when demand was high;
the regulator had mandated every
insurance company to cover Corona-
related ailments; and do all this, while
ensuring complete security and privacy
for the customer, as required by the
regulation.
He had to make the company work
in an uninterrupted manner, at a much
higher load. His challenges were:
To provide secure access from
home to most of the employees, by
extending the VPN to more users
Enable smooth collaboration to the
employees working from home
Enable customer service and
claims settlement staff to work
from home by allowing them to do
certain things on their mobiles.
Ensure that customer data is
protected at any cost and other
regulatory compliance is adhered
to, even when the data lie across
different infrastructure including
public cloud.
Ensure that user experience is not
impacted, as the usage shifted
greatly to mobile
To ensure that there is complete
visibility and ease of management
across infrastructure so that the
entire operation runs smoothly.
Your
Task
Create a secure technology
solution with seamless user
experience that can be sustained
and can be scaled up, if need be.
Please use the solutions
presented to you, using the
presentation template shared
with you.