LIC sets up data warehouse and data centre

30 November 2006

Chennai: LIC, the country's premier life insurer, and also one of the world's largest, has located its corporate active date warehouse (CADW) and data centre at Mumbai. Wipro Ltd, which is partnering LIC in this venture, will manage the centres for a period of eight years.

With the details of around 280 million policies in its bank, LIC's data warehouse will be one of the largest in the global life insurance sector. The depth of information contained in this huge database will reveal details not only about customers but also provide a detailed understanding of the business itself.

The CADW will operate as a powerful tool, enabling the LIC management to have enterprise level view of the business at a click of a button. More importantly, the intelligence gained through an analysis of this huge database will enable LIC to provide customised offerings to its customers, with attractive bundled offers. This, it hopes, will allow it to better meet customer aspirations. The CADW is expected to enable in-depth analysis for claims management and product development based on past trends.

The system has been designed to take a peak load of 7000 users, of which 3000 will be concurrently accessing the CADW for various requirements. LIC has set up the data centre with redundancy in each area to ensure continued working.

According to the insurer, data of all business units, i.e. 2,048 Branches, 101 Divisions, 71 pension and group business units, seven zonal offices as well as the corporate office, has been centralised in the CADW. The warehouse will contain data related to 280 million policies and their transactions over the past 5 years. Of these, 190 million policies are still active.

One of the major achievements of the CADW venture is the assigning of customer IDs to 147.55 million unique customers. Also, more than 350 analytical reports have been developed to cater to the requirements of business users at various levels.

Immediate and ongoing benefits of the project are:

360º view of customers – across product lines
Analysis of buying patterns and preferences of customers
Performance appraisals of various channels
Product innovation and differentiation
Targeted marketing campaigns with better targets and improved hit ratios.
Profitability and predictive analytical capabilities and
Regulatory Compliance.

Over the past four decades, says the insurer, it has been keeping pace with all technological advancements. According to the insurer, the focus of its technology initiatives now is the computerization of all customer service functions in operating offices as well as the integration of applications allowing the offering of single window service to customers.