Inside Max Life’s intricate digital transformation journey

• Max Life’s cloud footprint grew from 18% to a substantial 40% in two years
  
• With the automation of the policy issuance process, customers can now buy insurance in just 30 minutes
  
• Digital transformation also ensured that Max Life agent productivity increased by 40%
  

Two years ago, when the pandemic hit, Max Life Insurance was unprepared – just like any other player in the insurance sector. The company has come a long way since, having embarked on an ambitious transformation journey, with digital at the center of it.

The goal was to become a digital insurance company as digital disruption swept the sector.

Max Life has been highly successful in chasing this agenda. Two years down the line, more than 80% of Max Life’s business transactions are digitally driven and almost all its recruitment, training and skilling programs are conducted digitally.

Cloud has played a critical role in the company’s digital transformation journey. The insurer spotted the need to expand its cloud footprint from 18% two years ago to a substantially higher level in order to stay agile and responsive to market changes.

The company partnered with AWS as its cloud partner to accelerate the transition to be a digital insurance company. Its goal was to have a resilient and future-ready infrastructure, says Manu Lavanya, Director and Chief Operations Officer at Max Life.

“The life insurance industry is going through a significant digital transformation driven by the need for businesses to be extremely agile and flexible. By adopting AWS, Max Life has created a modern, future-ready digital infrastructure to support this transformation. AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities and the agility of the cloud enable us to experiment and innovate at a rapid pace to provide best-in-class customer experiences,” Lavanya said.

Making insurance more intelligent

Max Life’s cloud journey has been multi-dimensional, with several AWS public cloud offerings integrated at different levels and functions.


The most critical piece is the automation initiatives that Max Life undertook to improve the overall cycle time and customer experience. It leveraged the AWS Cloud capabilities, including storage, compute, and data analytics, to automate the issuance of new insurance policies, which is typically a time-consuming process with multiple verifications and validations.


Max Life’s other key focus area was to provide a more personalised and faster experience to its customers, who are now increasingly preferring digital engagement channels. Automated claims and disbursals etc., have become a norm in the market in the last two years. But this is particularly challenging when there is a sudden spike in demand. The month of March, for instance, is usually the busiest month for insurers.

Max Life leveraged AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to automatically scale workflows to better manage the load during peak periods.

For all of these critical automation initiatives to be successful, it was important for Max Life to bring all its data together. The company, therefore, built a data lake that centrally stores the company’s structured and unstructured data at scale. For this, it leveraged Amazon S3, an object storage service. Not just that, Max Life deployed the AWS serverless data integration service to consolidate and analyse anonymised customer data stored in the lake to get a 360-degree customer view for delivering personalised customer experiences, like specific coverage at lower premiums.

Compelling outcomes all across the board

A digital transformation project of this scale and magnitude was to certainly deliver great results for Max Life. The policy issuance automation initiative, for example, allows customers to now buy insurance in 30 minutes flat, in a hassle-free manner.

The overall transformation project has had a positive impact on agent productivity, which has seen a substantial 40% increase, according to Max Life. The centralised data lake helps Max Life to better research and develop new customer services, and improve operational efficiencies. All of this has helped the insurer to improve customer interactions and strengthen customer loyalty.

Max Life’s cloud footprint has now grown dramatically from 18% to 40%, with the ability to better handle business spikes that happen during new product launches and other critical initiatives. Most importantly, in its new digital avatar, Max Life provides quicker, frictionless experience to its customers.

Automation of the insurance value chain has enabled Max Life to achieve the ambitious goal of making insurance simple and easy to buy. With innovations in products, processes and engagement models, Max Life has managed to stay true to its mission to “inspire people to increase the value of their lives.”