‘India GCC is a microcosm of Guardian Life Insurance building tech solutions for the American market’

New York-based Guardian Life Insurance Company of America (Guardian) is a mutual life insurance firm with a legacy of over 160 years. It serves customers in the United States, offering a range of insurance and investment products.

For nearly two decades, the company has been associated with India’s technology industry via third-party service providers for IT outsourcing. Over the last 10 years, it has been running a global capability centre (GCC) in India—at Gurugram and Chennai—leveraging the talent in these cities to create intellectual property related to the insurance industry.

In general, GCCs in India have moved up the value chain from being lower-cost centres to those driving innovation. A report by Nasscom shows that there has been a 42 per cent increase in patent filing by GCCs in India. Also, many of these GCCs have global technology leadership roles based out of India.

Insurance is a complex industry and requires deep domain expertise to build technology solutions.

Guardian India operates as a microcosm of its parent company, deeply engaged with all the business lines in order to come up with technology innovations for use in the American market, which Guardian primarily serves, says Shiney Prasad, Country Head, Guardian India, in an interaction with Enterprise Story. It accounts for about one-fourth of the organisation’s global headcount.

Prasad says Guardian India has become co-partners with the parent company to develop newer solutions and processes that boost the overall growth of the organisation. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in India; in some cases, the entire end-to-end activity is done here, he adds.

Edited excerpts from the interview…

Enterprise Story (ES): How would you describe the journey of Guardian India as a GCC over the last 10 years?

Shiney Prasad (SP): Guardian has been engaged with third-party technology service providers over the last 15-20 years. Soon enough, we realised that either we continue with that operating model or create a little bit of our own IP. So, ten years back, Guardian India was set up, and we currently have a headcount of around 2,500 people. I strongly believe one can achieve scale through value and capability rather than just headcount addition.

In the last eight to nine years, we have wonderfully executed in terms of insourcing work from third parties. Now, we are focused on Guardian India’s 2.0 strategy, which has three key tenets.

Firstly, we are going to look at Guardian India through the eyes of the enterprise and not through the eyes of India, which means that we are acting on behalf of the enterprise and not aggregating head count in India. It is a question of what India is good at and what it can provide in terms of service, product offering, talent, capability, and so forth. We are supplementing and complementing Guardian and not competing. We operate as a microcosm of the parent.

The second piece is that we are going to be hiring techno functional skills. This would essentially mean making our people understand the entire gamut of the insurance industry and how it works. On top of it, we train them on Guardian’s product and services.

The third is about using technology to improve and do things differently. We are also focused on AI but, at the same time, it is not the only answer. We could improve a process through robotic process automation or create models using machine learning algorithms. We could also create our own GenAI solutions. We are of the belief that we will apply each of these technologies and tools where it best fits rather than apply only AI. Our desire is to keep improving and challenging the status quo.

ES: Is the GCC in India connected with every business of Guardian?

SP: I am proud to say that we are connected to every business line of Guardian. So we do technology work for our individual retail business, group benefit business, investment business, corporate organisation, and the list goes on. For a lot of these things, the heavy lifting is done here. In some of our products, the entire end-to-end activity is done out of India.

ES: Does Guardian India build technology platforms or products?

SP: We actually started work on this about a year back. There are about six or seven large businesses of Guardian, and we look at it from the eyes of business outcomes. So, typically, we don’t call them tech platforms. Tech is a huge driver but it needs to give us a business outcome. This also means undoing and reimagining some of the (existing) processes. A lot of these are being co-led out of India. A lot of the digital frameworks are kind of driven out of India.

ES: How is Guardian India leveraging AI?

SP: We are leveraging AI in multiple ways. For example, we get millions of calls in the organisation from customers enquiring about various things about their insurance policies. The conventional process is to provide response through IVR. We are going a step further and building AI models which are sophisticated self-services. This could mean offering choices to the customers in terms of insurance policies based on their profile, which is way more interactive. We are looking at applying AI in our claims organisation for better and more efficient adjudication. We are also using it for insurance underwriting.

ES: How does Guardian India attract talent?

SP: I am a firm believer that talent is available in the country. I think the bigger opportunity and challenge for the GCC is how do you engage with the talent to give them meaningful, enriching and complex work which is aspirational. We need to see that they are doing cutting edge work.

(The copy was updated.)