FGILI in India Covers Their Continuing Growth with Nutanix

CHALLENGES

Future Generali India Life Insurance Company Limited (FGILI) is a joint venture between the Future Group, an Indian conglomerate, and Generali, a global insurance group headquartered in Milan. It’s still early days for insurance in India, with general policy holders representing a fraction of the Indian population. As such, insurance companies are fighting to capture the first generation of policy holders, using digitization to optimize underwriting and reduce costs.

FGILI, which launched in 2007, is leveraging digital to help their 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.”

SOLUTION

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 want 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.

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 5.30pm to 6.30pm 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 sub one 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 services 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.

NEXT STEPS

FGILI is now looking at Nutanix Files, which will allow them to integrate scale-out storage for unstructured data, such as video onboarding and social-media feeds. The company is also seeking to reduce routine IT management even further through Nutanix Calm, enabling self-service capabilities.