Chennai: The Mumbai-based Birla Sun Life Insurance Company Limited has drawn up plans to automate its underwriting procedure. The company is going for imaging solution whereby the proposal forms submitted by its sales force would be scanned thereby avoiding manual data feeding.

According to M C Raisinghani, vice president,Technology, "Once the proposal form is scanned then the system would automatically transmit the data to an underwriter's terminal. Based on the workload that each underwriter has the system would select the appropriate terminal."

Birla Sun Life has shortlisted two vendors and is in the process of evaluating their solutions. "The outlay for this will be around Rs9 crore." When the solution is implemented even medical underwriting — persons who could be insured based on medical reports — could be done without much manual intervention.

While this project will go on stream this fiscal, Raisinghani says the company's data mining initiative will start next year. According to him preliminary work will start by the end of this fiscal.

The company is also in the process of upgrading its existing solution `Ingenium' to 6.6 version. The web enabled policy administration solution is supplied by the Toronto-based SolCorp a subsidiary EDS.

In addition the company is in the process of integrating its systems with that of its major bancassurance partners so that policy issuance and other aspects are seamless connected.

The new initiatives will help in increasing the online sales. According to P Nandagopal, senior vice president, alternate channels and group life, "Though we have not sold many policies online, it has given us good number of leads so that our agents could close a sale. Indians are bit reluctant to disclose their credit card numbers on the net."

Not willing to share the location of the company's disaster recovery centre, Rajsinghani says, "The centre is in a southern city. Actually it is a group venture. The investment is mainly towards software licensing. And every three months we test the disaster centre and our preparedness."