Chennai: Private life insurer MetLife India Insurance Company has started automating a part of its underwriting process to save the underwriter's time.

The company has translated all its underwriting rules into a software module, Aura, to automatically process an insurance proposal and issue the policy, both in medical and non-medical cases.

Says MetLife IT director Ajith Vellat: "Aura helps us to underwrite both at the new business as well as at the reinstatement stage. The module ensures quick turnaround time, in addition to consistency and accuracy of decision. Also checking the history will be easy as there will be records of the customer in the system."

The company will also consider interfacing Aura with the company's website, where a person can feed the data online, pay for the policy through the Web and download his policy.

Aura is one of the several software modules that MetLife uses under its overall IT platform called common operating platforms (COP). MetLife has customised the overall software package used by its sister outfit in Brazil to suit Indian conditions.

"This is part of MetLife International's policy of following uniform practice in countries where it is present. It helps in generating the reports in format it needs for various regulatory needs," says Vellat.

The US-based parent company considers its international operations as its growth engine and COP has different software components to support every one of MetLife's affiliates.

According to him, customising the Brazilian software package for Indian operations was done on the market/regulatory conditions that prevailed here. For instance, the most popular policy in India — the money back policy — is not a favoured product elsewhere.

"Abroad all mid-term changes in the policy could be made on the Web by the policyholder himself. Here there should be a formal letter from the customer and an endorsement to the original policy has to be issued by the insurer incorporating the change. These factors have been taken into account during customisation," says Vellat.

The other modules of COP are eSeg, Report Data Base (RDB) and Offline. "eSeg is a policy administration system that helps in managing the entire process from the application stage until dispatch of the policy document. It also supports post issuance customer service activities. Some of the key activities that eSeg performs are generation of customer identity, policy numbering, cancellation, reinstatement, alteration, customer service requests (change of name, address, beneficiary)," says Vellat.

The RDB is a locally envisaged and developed system used for printing documents — policies, premium / reminder / lapse notices very quickly. "On the other hand the offline module helps the company to capture and transfer of new application and remittance data from our regional / partner's offices to head office for processing."

According to Vellat, MetLife is also planning to have specialised portals dedicated to its sales team and customers. The Web portals will be hosted in Singapore.