FGILI in India Covers Their Continuing Growth with Nutanix

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud with rapid implementation from Network Techlab helps FGILI India to protect their year-on-year business gains in a developing market where digitization holds the key to success.

Organization
Future Generali India Insurance Company

Location
Mumbai

Domain
Financial Services

Solutions Offered
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS
Nutanix Prism management software
Nutanix Karbon

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Overview:
Future Generali India Insurance Company Limited is a 187 years old global insurance group featuring amongst the world’s 60 largest companies. The company was incorporated in September 2007 with the objective of providing retail, commercial, personal and rural insurance solutions to individuals and corporates to help them manage and mitigate risks. The company has been serving the customers by leveraging upon its global Insurance expertise in diverse classes of products of Generali Group and the Indian retail game changers Future Group.

Challenges:
FGILI, which launched in 2007, is leveraging digital to help its network of 12,000 distributors across India. The company has digitized the entire customer journey through an eco-system of applications, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven video onboarding. Not only does this increase efficiency but accuracy too—eliminating human error— and helping FGILI improve customer experience and maximize customer value. “Digitization is really about making life simpler,” says Byju Joseph, Chief Technology Officer at FGILI. “A customer can be onboarded in 15 minutes over video instead of the days it can take when everything has to be inputted from paper forms.”

When Byju looked at how the company was digitally transforming and the IT stack supporting the company’s distributors, there seemed an obvious disconnect. “We had a box for everything—servers, storage and networking. If we wanted to provision anything, it was 10 days minimum,” he says. “We needed to move away from such a time-consuming way of operating and into a more agile way of delivering IT.”

Business Benefits:
FGILI didn’t rush into anything and considered the options carefully. “We looked at the cloud, but I didn’t like the economics of a pure cloud play,” comments Byju. “Plus, finance industry regulators in India still wanted customer data to stay on-premises.” FGILI sought a sweet spot where they gained the agility of the cloud while still complying with Indian law. “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was a great fit for our needs,” says Byju. “It gave us agility, security and connectivity with a public cloud.”

FGILI did a detailed analysis of Nutanix compared with a three-tier infrastructure. The outcomes included:

Five-year total cost reduction of 43 percent
300 percent reduction in setup and provisioning efforts
99 percent reduction on time to resolve support tickets
100 percent reduction in data backup management
80 percent reduction in data center emissions

These figures made selling Nutanix to the wider business simple. What’s more, the support Byju received from Nutanix over the analysis, and the responsiveness of the Nutanix team made him feel he had a trusted IT advisor. FGILI then worked with Nutanix Partner Network Techlab, which deployed the solution, which currently includes three nodes of NX-3155-G5 and three nodes of NX-8035-G6 running the Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS) and Prism for single-pane management. The infrastructure, which supports all distributor-facing applications, including lead control, needs analysis, data capture, customer management and video onboarding, also includes Nutanix Karbon to manage Kubernetes clusters. Byju tells how impressed he was with the speed of implementation by Network Techlab, which also provides frontline support. “We had the Nutanix environment in place and running in just seven days—when previously any three-tier project took no less than 20,” he says.

Digitization is transforming the entire insurance market in India, where still just a fraction of the population has policies. With our hyperconverged solution, we are leveraging a combination of private and public cloud capabilities that keep regulators happy while giving us the agility to build the digital solutions to seize on the market opportunities.

– Byju Joseph, Chief Technology Officer at Future Generali India Life Insurance Company Limited

Customer Outcome:
The IT benefits alone make this one of the most effective IT projects to-date for FGILI. Indeed, the success from migrating to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has rippled out far beyond the Data Center to FGILI’s 12,000-strong distributor network. Says Byju, “Peak connections to our distributor applications are normally between 5.30 pm to 6.30 pm with around 30,000 calls to the server. Response times could be 15 seconds with our three-tier infrastructure, which was frustrating for distributors and bad for business. But with Nutanix, we’ve got that down to 1.34 seconds, and we aim to get it 1 second. Distributors are highly satisfied.”

Just how satisfied distributors are with Nutanix can be seen in the 92 percent adoption rate for applications nowadays. Compare this with the 60 percent adoption rate in the past, and the performance improvements are crystal clear. What makes Byju so pleased is that it shows how close FGILI is to standardizing processes. Through automation and standardization, FGILI can make better operational decisions in terms of service processes, pricing, risk assessment and fraud detection. The insurance business is increasingly driven by Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, and the use of video onboarding by FGILI reflects this. “We’re in a great position to kick on and leverage this future-looking technology with Nutanix,” comments Byju.

Benefits:

Enables a company to support 30% year-on-year growth
Improves application response time by around 91% to help insurance distributors serve customers better
Increases digital adoption by insurance distributors to 92% helping accelerate standardization in customer lifecycle management
Delivers five-year IT total cost reduction of 43%
Supports 300% reduction in IT setup and provisioning efforts
Ensures 99% reduction on time to resolve support tickets
Provides 100% reduction in Data Backup management and 80% reduction in data center emissions

Business Benefits:
By partnering with Nutanix, FGILI is staying ahead at a time when insurance companies are digitizing the entire customer journey. The company has moved to a Nutanix HCI as the foundation for their private cloud and accelerated the performance of the applications that insurance distributors use to convert newly acquired customers into lifetime partners while also giving their customers the convenience of taking out policies themselves with artificial-intelligence-driven video onboarding.