CSOB Insurance Slovakia

Organization

The CSOB group is a leading player in the Slovak financial services industry and is a part of the KBC Group. Combining the power of its retail brands – CSOB (banking, insurance, asset management, leasing and factoring) and other members of the financial group – CSOB group holds strong market positions in all segments of Slovak financial market.

The KBC Group is an integrated bank-assurance group, catering mainly to retail customers, small and medium-sized enterprises and private banking clientele. It occupies leading positions on its home markets of Belgium and Central and Eastern Europe, where it specializes in retail bank-assurance and asset management activities, as well as in the provision of services to businesses.

The Group is also active in a selection of other countries in Europe in private banking and services to businesses. Elsewhere around the globe, the Group has established a presence in selected countries and regions.

Challenge – Increased Market adaptability and Online Sales

The organization’s existing sales processes were highly dependent on hard-copy paper documents, resulting in enormous inefficiencies in time, man power, and cost of day to day business operations for the insurance provider as a whole.

A large portion of these processes were driven by pre-printed paper forms which required filling by intermediaries and then manually transcribing by back office personnel to be digitized and stored into a centralized system of record.

This inefficiency became a prioritized issue to address for the insurance group, who required to minimize as much as possible the usage of paper documents throughout their business operations. Emeldi were asked to deliver a project to effectuate a complete digitization of document processing for their B2B sales channels.

The primary goal of the project was to replace the legacy processes with an automated web-based sales engine allowing users to enter policy data directly into online forms, and integrating directly to the insurance architecture. This approach both completely eliminated the need for paper documentation, as well as the need of manual intervention by back office staff.

A pre-study was conducted and a set of prioritized high-level business requirements were identified as having both the highest quick-win potential and as contributing the most to the well-established CSOB group strategy bearing the greatest cost-saving effects. These included:

  • Tools for quoting and sale of non-life insurance products (Travel, Household, MTPL, Casco)
  • Advanced tools for intermediaries (list of existing business cases, document library)
  • One-way communication platform for intermediaries (inbox containing centrally generated messages and interventions for intermediary)
  • Advanced tools for sales network management (administration of user rights, code-lists and ad-hoc reminders)

The main goals of the sales tool implementation were to:

  • Substantially reduce the use of pre-printed forms in policy selling processes
  • Reduce the time and manual processing effort needed for transcribing data from paper documents and the costs related to sending of paper documents
  • Consolidate a unified tool for policy sales, replacing all existing retail non-life front-end applications
  • Create a platform capable of real-time evaluation of B2B sales network performance
  • Expose standard interfaces for 3rd parties to implement the sales of CSOB Insurance products within their own information systems

Resolution

CSOB was able to deploy a new B2B online sales channel fulfilling the following business and technical objectives:

  • Introduction of a unified sales tool for non-life policies
  • Introduction of an on-line environment for configuring, pricing, quoting, and provisioning  of non-life insurance products
  • Deploying a state-of-the-art front-end layer offering a rich set of features
  • Facilitated integration with the Group’s technological standards
  • Optimized fit into the sales landscape and significant reduction to total cost of ownership

Business Value Added

Acting as a driver of the delivery, the Emeldi Group effectively coordinated the delivery with CSOB’s various business and IT personnel ensuring that the project stakeholders’ requirements were met in their entirety.

The project results were viewed by CSOB as a complete success, and have created a foundation framework for their B2B portal applications clearing space for continued application enhancements. CSOB’s project investment has started to bear its fruit, and CSOB was eager to expand the functional reach and scope of the portal into additional areas. Emeldi and CSOB will continue to work together in enhancing the application’s scope and business function in future phases.