‘This means that there will be more than 1,000 tech talent in India over the next 12-18 months.’
Global reinsurance giant Swiss Re, which has been in India since the start of the century, is focusing on insourcing technology over the last few years.
It has led to higher demand for data and analytics engineers, who help in preparing better risk models.
This helps underwriters price the products better.
In a conversation with Avik Das/Business Standard in Bengaluru, Amit Kalra, managing director and head of Swiss Re Global Business Solutions, talks about how India is becoming a critical technology talent hub for the reinsurer.
What has been the journey of Swiss Re’s global capability centre in India over the last two decades?
We started 25 years ago in India as a shared services centre, which was defined on cost play till about 2007. From 2007, we started our economic research, actuarial functions, and analytics which continued for a decade.
Then it was a question of how do we build more business capabilities, where is the next evolution cycle, global capabilities and making ourselves more integrated to the headquarters.
Over the last eight years, we have grown three times. The number of vice-presidents has grown 4x and we have covered the full value chain of operations.
As part of it, the focus also went into bolstering our technology talent.
While I head this global capability centre (GCC), we do not call ourselves a GCC internally. I believe that while it is good to start from a cost play and then talent and capability, eventually one has to become integrated to the enterprise.
And, that is how you break the glass ceiling and take on more global roles and responsibilities.
Why did you choose India to become a critical part of your tech talent ecosystem?
Over the last three years, Swiss Re globally went through an internalisation drive in the tech domain.
We have about 2,500 employees in the country out of the 14,000 globally. Our tech team, which had just 150 people three years ago here, has now grown to 750.
We have two centres, one in Bengaluru with 400 engineers and the other in Hyderabad with 350. We plan to open a bigger office in Hyderabad this year which will push up those numbers to 700.
This means that there will be more than 1,000 tech talent in India over the next 12-18 months.
It will be about 40-50 per cent of our global engineering workforce.
What sort of talent do you hire?
A majority of our hiring is going on in the engineering side, for product engineering, architects and data engineers.
A lot of it is lateral hiring but we are also opening up our channels for graduate hiring.
That will involve training in insurance and reinsurance. Even as many have technology skills, they still need a domain understanding.
What are some key critical functions done from India?
A few years ago, we launched our fee-based business which is also called solutions. Here we share our risk and data insights for a fee income, which is monitoring our own internal risk insight capabilities.
The chief technology officer (CTO) of that business is based out of India, which shows that ownership of the new business is here.
We also have our life and health underwriting platforms, with multiple product owners out of India.
Some of the GenAI use cases we are experimenting on the claims side — as well as on enhanced customer experience — are also getting piloted from this country.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
