About Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance is a private life insurance company in India that provides various insurance products for investment planning and financial security.
Challenge
The Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance legacy core insurance platform system was limiting the deployment of new capabilities and services, while its rising support and licensing costs had become untenable. They needed a new system, one built on a modern, open platform that would not compromise on performance.
Solution
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance deployed EDB Postgres Advanced, EDB’s enterprise class PostgreSQL offering, with operational support. Partner Chemtrols Infotech and EDB created the design to meet the performance and business requirements of the organization and assisted with its deployment.
Results
- Seamless transition with no service interruption; customers were not aware of the major upgrade
- PostgreSQL effortlessly handled both regular loads and seasonal periods of higher transactions
- Higher performance made it possible to deliver key business statistics in real time and support data driven decisions
- Significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) with no compromise in database performance
Limitations of legacy systems prompt a switch to a new environment powered by PostgreSQL
Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance is a private life insurance company and one of the top six players in the life insurance business in India. For two decades, its network of more than 116,000 agents (as of 31st December 2021) and its over 240 bank partners have served over 100 million customers.
As part of its digital transformation initiative, in 2020, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance sought to replace its aging core insurance platform with an up-to-date system built on a modern, cloud-based architecture. This platform would form the basis of an advanced digital ecosystem with the versatility and technical capabilities needed to support a new slew of services for its customers, partners, agents and bank assurance partners.
“Customers today want more options than before and more flexibility to manage their cash flow and easily adjust their premiums,” said Goutam Datta, Chief Information & Digital Officer at Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance. “They also want the ability to directly buy life insurance through a seamless, user-friendly e-commerce platform either online or through a mobile app.”
As these features could not be intuitively implemented using the old legacy system, the team initiated a search for a new system. Not keen to be locked into a proprietary environment, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance sought out open source platforms, eventually settling for Red Hat OpenShift for container orchestration and EDB Postgres Advanced for their database management system (DBMS).
“We selected Postgres for our database because it gives us the required scalability, uptime guarantees with the support of EDB, and equivalent SQL functionality similar to our old platform. Deployed in the cloud, Postgres gives us that flexibility, uptime, and elasticity for rapid growth. And we are not held back by storage capacity or other limitations of the data center environment, unlike an on-premises deployment,” said Nitin Bansod, Vice President, Infrastructure Engineering.
Postgres provides faster time-to-market and greater cost-effectiveness
The biggest challenge that Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance faced with its legacy system came from its insurance policy administration system and the difficulty in creating and launching new insurance products in a timely manner. Substantial manual configurations and coding were needed, which unnecessarily delayed the launch process. Moreover, the rigidity of the platform made it laborious to make changes to existing offerings.
In addition, the limitations of the old system significantly increased the cost of implementing new capabilities. For instance, developing mobile applications or chatbots and integrating them with the old system was deemed extremely resource intensive. Attempts to incorporate automation through robotic process automation (RPA) proved difficult as well. On the other hand, starting with a clean slate would allow these capabilities to be quickly built and rolled out.
The high cost of licensing and support for the old system was another consideration as it significantly reduced the resources available for new digital initiatives. Regular price increase built into the original end-user license agreement and two decades of service life had ballooned fees to an unacceptable level. Because a substantial proportion of the TCO stems from the DBMS, the switch to Postgres reduced costs considerably while meeting performance requirements.
Rapid implementation with familiar technology
One key consideration at Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance was ensuring that its expertise built up over the last two decades could be retained and reused. This meant that the chosen solution should be easy to learn and should leverage the existing skill set within the organization—prerequisites that EDB Postgres Advanced met on the DBMS front.
“Our hard-won skills are a company asset; we can’t lose them just like that. EDB has a platform that is very easy to understand, adapt and migrate to. Many data types are similar, and even the query language is similar. All these mean that we do not have to spend much in terms of time and resources to learn the new DBMS,” explained Datta.
Finally, the deep expertise and support of the implementation team of Chemtrols Infotech meant that any issues around data and architecture were quickly addressed. Installation and configuration of EDB Postgres Advanced were completed quickly, allowing the chosen new system to be brought to market at a faster rate.
“The architecture designed by Chemtrols Infotech and EDB was very well structured. The entire implementation process was also fast, allowing us to deliver the overall solution on time. From the standpoint of timeliness and technical capability, the engineering resources were highly competent and proved to be an advantage,” Bansod summed up.