Great Eastern Holdings

The team is organized like a "typical software house" where the service delivery heads deliver solutions to customers, and there are competency heads, such as project managers, business analysts, and application developers, who deliver lines of resources to the service delivery heads.

The company makes sure that the skills and competencies of the resources are aligned across the Singapore and Malaysia offices. This includes ensuring that work process and the IT architecture are standardized across the board.

And to improve operational efficiency, Great Eastern implemented its Electronic Mobile Advisory Solutions (E-MAS) in 2005 to re-engineer various business processes to improve its operational efficiency.

The E-MAS, is a fully integrated system developed by Great Eastern to allow straight-through electronic submission and processing of insurance proposals, made possible by system integration and electronic signature technology.

Before the launch of E-MAS, customers were required to sign three sets of documents of between 30 to 40 pages for every insurance policy. E-MAS now provides the paperless solution to this cumbersome procedure and even ensures that all required information from the customers are not left out.

For this project, Great Eastern Life was selected for ZDNet Asia's Financial services Technology Project of the Year award.

Ng told ZDNet Asia: "E-MAS has not only helped to save cost and time for our life planners, but it has also enhanced their competitiveness and professionalism to create a complete customer experience."

He highlighted that because E-MAS is an integrated system that allows straight-through processing from sales to delivery of the insurance policy, the turnaround time for a proposal is also now much faster.