About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured? The legal and compliance department is led by general counsel, Narendra Gangan who manages the department. The legal department has a constant flow of challenging work and there are various dedicated teams to deal with subject matters, though we strongly believe in collaborating together to deliver as a cohesive department. The legal team is led by vice president and head-legal Sankalp Jain who oversees a team of 19 lawyers. The legal team is split into two silos, corporate legal and zonal legal. The corporate legal team is led by associate vice president – legal Kiran Unnikrishnan, who oversees a team of five corporate lawyers. The zonal legal team is led by associate vice president – legal Rajeev Kumar, senior managers Vinay Prakash and Jovita Desai who together oversee a team of 12 lawyers spread across the country. Although both team have different mandates, they collaborate together on various projects depending upon business demands. Under corporate legal, we work on all contractual documentation for the company, cover insurance product policy documentation, and provide corporate legal advisory on all projects. We churn almost 1,000-1,200 plus contracts annually apart from working on strategic investment mandates and business projects, providing routine legal advisory and contract negotiation for the business.

Under zonal legal, we handle pan India litigation cases covering the insurance ombudsman, consumer forums, civil and criminal matters with an approximate count of 2,500 plus cases. Due to the nature of the insurance business, there is a continuous influx of new legal cases or claims on a monthly basis, and the team has to consistently focus on defending and disposing the cases appropriately. Both the silos are almost run like a revenue centre as opposed to a cost centre, as we saved approximately INR 310m of cost savings in 2018 through effective litigation and contract management. The legal department as a whole is also engaged in dealing and complying with requirements of multiple regulatory bodies like IRDAI, SEBI, RBI, MCA, BSE and NSE on an ongoing basis. Some of the other supporting activities are implementing listing compliances with Stock Exchanges, designing robust legal processes, policy advocacy framework, assisting in regulatory relationship management and corporate governance with the board, and ensuring compliance to the regulatory framework mandated by IRDAI. What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how does the team intend to assist with this? HDFC Life is one of the most valuable private life insurance companies in India. The focus is on building a long-term and sustainable business, deep commitment to customers’ interests, creating customer-friendly products, sustained investment in technology for customers and distributors alike, as well as operational and sales efficiencies The legal team is well aligned with this five pronged strategy and is required to be strategic, to be able to anticipate issues and estimate risks, including, reputational, business, regulatory and legal risks. The legal team works closely with each and every department of the company to resolve issues to advance business. The key objective being to proactively identify issues, provide solutions, balance risk and growth, and provide a governing framework to seamlessly operate and ensure compliance with the legal and regulatory framework in which the company operates. The legal department has cohesively worked with various internal stakeholders and facilitated integrated insurance offerings and solutions across loyalty, e-wallets, telecom, news media and e-commerce interfaces to keep pace with changing business models and to increase penetration. HDFC Life was the first life insurance company to develop platform and industry agnostic integration capabilities across various ecosystems, for offering life and health insurance solutions to customers. The legal team, on an ongoing basis, will continue to collaborate with the business and demonstrates strong collaborative and cohesive working skills which enable business development initiatives of the company, while ensuring compliance with the extant regulatory provisions. How has the team harnessed technology to improve output or drive efficiencies? The legal department uses a mix of internally developed technology solutions and external applications to improve performance and drive efficiency. Litigation management: The insurance sector in India is very litigation intensive, and we have a robust internal IT system for effective litigation management. Since we deal with large volumes of legal cases spread across the country and also provide legal support to more than 400 branches of the company, this tool acts as a case repository for effective monitoring of life cycle of a legal case. The same is also used for internal financial controls, to ascertain and report legal exposure. We also use external technology systems to monitor life cycle of almost 2,500 plus cases on a real time basis as these solutions are connected to a repository of courts electronically, and case hearing updates and alerts are triggered and notified to the department via email and mobile alerts. This helps in real time monitoring of our legal exposure and assists in preparation, review and strategizing for important legal matters. We also use internal analytical tools to study co-relation between legal cases, repudiation of claims and customer complaints, and work towards legal solutions in reducing pendency of cases, and customer complaints. Knowledge management: we use advanced legal tools in the market for knowledge management, legal alerts, subject matter legal opinions, judgement trackers to continuously update ourselves on the latest legal precedents impacting our industry and business. Contract management: we are working on migrating to new legal technology solution which will allow us to track renewals, the expiry of contracts, trigger key actionable alerts, key clauses library, auto generation of standard templates, version controls, effective repository and monitoring of life cycle of contracts.

Can you explain the team’s ethos? The key traits like high integrity, ethics, sound legal judgment, regulatory expertise, corporate governance, executive presence, delivering under pressure, developing and nurturing talent are part of the culture at HDFC Life Insurance. We continuously set new bars for delivering performance, as we work with the business not only on routine business matters but also assist in strategic projects, designing ground-breaking products, inventive models and risk mitigation solutions for our internal and external clients. The approach to “think out of the box” is percolated down the team so that we continuously deliver when the business demands and live up to the expectation of being part of one of the most valuable insurance company in India. The team regularly collaborates on different projects with several corporate teams to get holistic exposure to the business apart from the regular legal domain.