From pioneering “Mirror Operations” to piloting AI-powered underwriting and claims tools, Sun Life Global Solutions’ India operations are steadily evolving into a strategic transformation hub. Rajat Vibhas, Head of Operations, shares how his 1,600-member team in India is not only supporting global clients but also reshaping operational models to deliver resilience, speed, and innovation. With a strong focus on DigiOps, low-code/no-code adoption, and embedding transformation into everyday roles, Vibhas emphasises that the future of GCCs lies in becoming fully integrated global centres, where location no longer defines capability.
Could you provide a brief overview of your current role as the Head of Operations and your key priorities?
I’ve been with Sun Life for the past seven years and have been leading India operations for the last five. Sun Life is a 160-year-old, Canada-headquartered company. In India, we are a 100% owned global capability centre. Our team, which consists of about 1,600 people out of the 3,500 in India, supports our group and individual life clients. We handle their needs across the entire client lifecycle, from onboarding and pre-sales to new business, underwriting, servicing, and finally, claims support. My mandate is to deliver on these client requests while continuously transforming our operations.
How has Sun Life leveraged “Mirror Operations” to build operational resilience and business continuity?
It’s been a journey. Most companies set up their centres with cost arbitrage in mind and then move towards value arbitrage. The idea behind Mirror Operations, which started before COVID-19, was to build our centres in India and the Philippines to be as deep and broad as our core locations. We wanted to be able to handle work across all product lines and capabilities, which would improve our resilience and business continuity.
The program was not about adding more full-time employees; it was about ensuring we could perform end-to-end work, which in turn helped from a client perspective. Traditionally, a lot of basic-level work would be offshored and then sent back, which added to lead times and wasn’t a great client experience. With Mirror Operations, our mindset shifted from a simple lift-and-shift model to a transform-and-shift model. This has brought new capabilities to India, from end-to-end claims handling to building a bilingual team with close to 100 people who speak both French and English.
AI adoption is accelerating within GCCs. How is Sun Life leveraging AI for functions like underwriting and claims processing?
It’s still a journey. We have an innovation hub that works with our global teams to leverage the startup ecosystem. Our technology journey is holistic, focusing on a hierarchy of technologies. At the base, we have low-code/no-code and micro-automation. In the middle, we have Robotic Process Automation, where we’ve grown from one bot to over 25. At the top, we have AI/ML, GenAI and emerging tech.
On AI specifically, we have a few use cases. One is Advisor Buddy for Vietnam and now Canada, where agents can get immediate answers to product and business questions. We’ve also used audio analytics for client journey mapping, where GenAI transcribes and summarises recorded conversations with medical professionals. Another example is medical summarisation of reports, which saves a significant amount of time. We are also piloting a translation tool for documents. The challenge is creating an orchestration layer that talks to our legacy systems without interfering with our core mainframe.
What operational challenges have you faced during the digital transformation and cloud migration, especially for a company that is 160 years old?
We’ve invested in platforms like Salesforce and Pega, which are more advanced and have APIs to connect with our legacy systems. We have to be very careful due to data security concerns. We’ve developed a contract review utility that uses AI and ML. It is kept outside our core systems to do quality checks on documents and has saved us a lot of money. The biggest challenge is creating a middleware or orchestration layer that can communicate with our mainframe systems and new platforms seamlessly. While we have cloud modernisation programs underway, mainframe modernisation is an expensive proposition. So, for now, our tech teams are focused on creating a middle path where we can mirror the mainframe data rather than altering it daily.
Tell us about the role of your DigiOps team. How does it contribute to this transformation?
We changed our mindset a few years ago. We now have a run, grow, transform model. While delivering our daily client transactions with utmost quality is our bread and butter, managers are now measured on their contributions to the growth and transformation aspects of the business. We have a set of automation initiatives that we track. Projects with savings below $30,000 are part of our continuous improvement culture, while those above are considered DigiOps projects.
We’ve trained our people on low-code/no-code platforms like Microsoft Power Apps and Pega, allowing them to do micro-automation themselves. This has democratised technology. The operations team has become an idea generator, working with our tech and innovation teams to identify manual processes that can be automated. We are no longer simply asking for solutions; we are equal stakeholders in the process.
How do you integrate people, technology, and process to foster operational excellence and innovation?
It all comes down to the simple model of people, process, and technology. From a technology perspective, our focus is digital transformation, and we are also building operational products and solutions. We have dedicated talent to manage these projects and are upskilling our teams on platforms and AI assessments.
From a process standpoint, we are now deeply involved in mapping client and supplier journeys end-to-end. This has generated a lot of new automation ideas. On the people side, we’ve changed our promotion mechanism to reward those who contribute to transforming the business, not just those who manage large teams. In our hiring process, we also look for candidates with experience in transformation or technology, as it’s no longer just about spans of control.
Could you share some insights on your collaborations with other GCCs and your outlook on their future evolution?
While we don’t have direct collaborations, we participate in many industry conversations. The journey for GCCs is a simple one: from cost-saving delivery centres to value-added centres, and now to innovation hubs. The future, I believe, is a global integrated centre where employees see themselves as part of the larger organisation, regardless of their physical location. You will start to see more and more leaders from GCCs being part of the main business conversations, not just the delivery ones.