How Bajaj Life is rearchitecting insurance for scale, trust, and intelligence

Goutam Datta, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Bajaj Life Insurance, reflects on a six-year transformation that has redefined how life insurance is sold, issued, and experienced in India.

Life insurance has never been an easy business—neither to sell nor to service. In India’s BFSI landscape, it remains one of the most complex products, involving long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, regulatory scrutiny, and significant trust considerations. When Bajaj Life Insurance embarked on its digital transformation journey nearly six years ago, the ambition was not incremental automation. It was a structural change.

“We started this journey five to six years back. By now, it has almost matured,” says Goutam Datta, Chief Information & Digital Officer at Bajaj Life. “But to understand the transformation, you first have to understand the business we are in.”

A multi-channel reality, digitised end-to-end

Bajaj Life operates across distinctly different distribution models. The traditional agency channel remains a large pillar, supported by a vast hierarchy of insurance consultants responsible for lead generation and customer engagement. Institutional business—driven by banks, brokers, and digital intermediaries such as Policybazaar—is even larger and far more integration-intensive. Then there is Bajaj Life’s proprietary sales force (PSF), where the organisation owns the entire customer journey, and a rapidly growing fully digital, in-house channel.

Each of these channels demands different systems, journeys, and controls. Yet, what unites them today is the complete absence of paper.

“Almost none of our business today is manual,” Datta explains. “Every form, every document, every payment, and even policy issuance is digital. That didn’t happen by accident.”

The challenge went far beyond digitising forms. Life insurance policies are rarely issued in a single interaction. Customer interventions, underwriting checks, document validations, and partner coordination introduce friction and delays. Managing this complexity at scale required platforms that were not just digital, but intelligent.

The one-minute policy vision

At the outset of the transformation, Bajaj Life posed what seemed like a radical question for the industry: Could a life insurance policy be issued within a minute?

“At that time, it sounded almost weird,” Datta recalls. “But today, a significant number of our policies across channels are issued within a minute.”

This shift was enabled by analytics-driven underwriting, pre-filled journeys, reduced data entry, smarter document validation, and seamless digital payments. While some policies still require manual intervention, the difference between the organisation’s state five years ago and today is, as Datta puts it, “chalk and cheese.”

Today, 99.999 per cent of Bajaj Life’s business flows through its digital systems.

Business problems that made transformation inevitable

The triggers for transformation were deeply rooted in operational pain points. In institutional business, onboarding a new bank partner once took three to four months. Today, if no bespoke journey is required, a partner can be onboarded in as little as two days—sometimes without senior leadership even being directly involved.

“All integrations, payloads, service sequences—everything is documented and available through our portals,” says Datta. “That completely changes the conversation.”

In the agency channel, the challenge was configurability. Different teams needed different sales journeys, yet maintaining multiple platforms was not viable. The answer came in the form of highly configurable platforms such as DigiAgency, enabling varied workflows on a single core system.

For the proprietary sales force, the need was even more foundational: sophisticated lead management to mature customer intent before sales engagement began.

Across channels, the non-negotiables were clear—platforms had to exist, platforms had to scale, and platforms had to adapt without slowing the business.

The hardest decision: Transforming the core

Perhaps the most consequential leadership decision Bajaj Life made was to transform its core systems—not just the digital front-end.

“If the core does not get transformed, digital agility becomes lipstick on a pig,” Datta states bluntly.

Bajaj Life undertook a full-scale core transformation, building a microservices-based policy administration system with over 300 interconnected services. The impact on business agility was dramatic. While the industry typically takes five to seven weeks to configure and launch a new product, Bajaj Life can now do so in as little as two days once testing is complete.

This architecture allows selective exposure of services to partners, faster experimentation, and unprecedented time-to-market advantages.

Alongside the core, Bajaj Life invested heavily in configurable onboarding platforms, partner management systems, underwriting engines, renewal and revenue (R&R) platforms, customer portals, mobile apps, and one of the industry’s most advanced WhatsApp-based customer bots.

Making intelligence invisible, but effective

What customers see is only part of the transformation. Much of the real impact lies beneath the surface.

Analytics and AI have been embedded deeply into processes to drive “first-time-right” outcomes. Documents are validated at upload, not at the end of the journey. Errors are flagged early. Underwriters receive cleaner cases. Customers experience fewer back-and-forth delays.

Data has been treated as a strategic asset. Bajaj Life’s enterprise data warehouse was re-architected to capture time-based dimensions more effectively, enabling faster insights and better decision-making across the organisation.

“All of this is to make business easier to do,” Datta says. “For customers, partners, and employees.”

Execution while flying the plane

Executing such a transformation in a live business environment was, by Datta’s own admission, exhausting.

“You are changing every part of a flying aeroplane while it is flying,” he says. “There is no downtime.”

Technology and architecture were only two pillars of execution. The third, and perhaps most critical, was culture.

“There will be smoke. Blips are inevitable,” Datta explains. “Technology alone cannot manage that. Culture becomes the final saviour.”

Core transformations, he notes, are easy to start and extremely easy to fail. Completing them requires organisational commitment across technology, operations, finance, and business teams. Bajaj Life’s ability to stay aligned through years of change, he believes, sets it apart in the industry.

AI beyond the buzzwords

As AI dominates industry conversations, Bajaj Life has focused on applied intelligence rather than experimentation for its own sake.

Its AI-powered customer bot is fully cognitive—understanding intent, language shifts between English and Hindi, and conversational context rather than following scripted menus. The organisation has also piloted AI-driven “humanoid” outbound calling systems that mimic natural human interactions for servicing use cases.

AI plays a crucial role in partner training as well. Given the complexity of life insurance products and high churn among new advisors, AI-driven platforms help agents prepare personalised sales pitches before customer meetings, improving effectiveness and confidence.

Risk assessment and customer segmentation have also become more nuanced, allowing Bajaj Life to tailor journeys based on financial literacy, documentation, and earning profiles—without excluding customers.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Datta says. “We have only just started with generative AI and ML.”

Measuring what matters

For Datta, success is measured through two lenses. One is deeply personal—whether the work remains intellectually satisfying. The other is organisational: whether a solution genuinely solves a problem and is adopted at scale.

“Adoption is everything,” he says. “We have examples where we did everything right technically, but it didn’t solve the problem. The real wins are where business problems are solved and embraced by the organisation.”

After six years of sustained transformation, Bajaj Life is now beginning to reap the benefits—faster product launches, near-instant policy issuance, scalable partner ecosystems, and intelligent customer experiences.

As Datta signs off, one thing is clear: this was not a digital overhaul for visibility or headlines. It was a foundational rethinking of how life insurance can work—at speed, at scale, and with intelligence built in.