Chief Operating Officer / India
Completion needed evidence beyond the internal task
- Operating colleagues
- 214
- Six heads within the COO remit
- Annual service-operation expense
- ₹37 crore
- Separate from premium and annuity disbursements
- Operations experience
- 36 years
- Transaction records, processing and insurer service
Decisions & consequences
012019: twenty-four thousand instructions were not twenty-four thousand credited payments
As head of operations, I accepted a report describing an annuity file of 24,000 instructions as fully paid after transmission. The supporting bank-return account did not justify that status. It showed 23,680 confirmed credits,240 returned instructions and eighty still awaiting reconciliation. The three groups added to the original file, but they did not represent the same customer outcome. I had allowed an internal processing milestone to become a claim that the entire obligation had been completed.
I corrected the management account and worked with finance and service colleagues on the appropriate next action for each group. The CEO approved ₹68 lakh over ten weeks for reconciliation capacity, exception handling and customer communication. Returned items needed their reasons examined and any replacement instruction properly authorised. The eighty pending items first needed their status established through the banking process. We did not blindly resend them: uncertainty about the first instruction was not evidence that a second one would be safe or necessary.
The revised report retained confirmed credit, return and pending status separately. It did not claim that all 320 exceptions had subsequently been resolved or that the review produced a particular financial saving. Authorised owners continued the case work, with customers given an appropriate account of the next step. Finance retained control of payment authorisation and reconciliation, while operations provided the service capacity and kept the unresolved population visible.
The important correction was in my own definition of completion. A file can leave our system successfully while a customer remains without a confirmed payment. A high proportion of completed transactions does not remove the remaining responsibility. I learned to ask which external evidence supports the status and who owns the next action before accepting the final line of an operating report. The work improved the decision account; it was not a claim that every future payment would complete without exceptions.
2023: nineteen bank-detail changes remained unverified without becoming fraud findings
A selected service review covered forty-eight requests to change the bank details used for continuing annuity payments. The operating pressure was to update records quickly, especially where a request appeared in a familiar email exchange. I asked the team to distinguish receipt of a request from verification that an authorised person had made it and that the new instruction could be used. Finance and compliance owners defined the appropriate evidence and trusted contact route; service colleagues did not invent their own identity test.
Twenty-nine changes were verified through the approved process. Nineteen remained unresolved and were not applied. That count did not establish fraud, dishonesty or a loss of contractual entitlement. The existing payment arrangement also required its own assessment. A pending change was neither an instruction to cancel every valid payment nor permission to continue using details known to be unsuitable. Authorised owners considered the actual circumstances, with any payment status and necessary follow-up kept distinct from the change request.
The CEO approved ₹52 lakh over eight weeks for service capacity, reconciliation support and improvements to the instruction-change workflow. Tenzin Dezrqavi coordinated the operating response. We explained the outstanding step to customers without asking them to disclose sensitive credentials through informal channels. The account retained the nineteen unresolved requests and did not manufacture a later approval or claim that a specific loss had been prevented.
My decision was to fund a controlled route instead of allowing speed to substitute for authority. It required a more careful conversation than either accepting every request or treating every incomplete check as suspicious conduct. The case showed how several different questions can sit inside one customer contact: who authorised a change, whether the new details are usable, what happened to an earlier payment and what the contract requires next. Operations needed to connect the owners of those questions while keeping their conclusions separate.
2025: an existence check needed alternatives to the usual attendance route
A selected programme involved 120 annuity customers who could not complete the insurer’s usual attendance-based existence-verification route. The account did not assume why each person had difficulty or treat non-attendance as evidence that entitlement had ended. I asked legal, compliance and service owners to identify acceptable alternatives for the relevant contracts and circumstances. The resulting programme offered an approved remote route where suitable and arranged visits where that was the workable option.
Seventy-four customers completed the defined verification remotely and thirty-two through an arranged visit. Fourteen remained unresolved at the review point and continued to receive case-specific follow-up. Those numbers described this selected programme; they were not a population access rate or proof that one method would suit every annuitant. A remote session still had to meet its approved requirements, and a visit was not simply a formality because a colleague had travelled. The relevant professional owners retained decisions about evidence and contractual consequences.
The CEO approved ₹74 lakh over sixteen weeks for service preparation, staff capacity, scheduling and the supporting workflow. This was programme expense, not a deduction from annuity payments. Tenzin Dezrqavi coordinated the operating arrangements and retained the unfinished cases in the management account. The programme did not assert a universal regulatory interval, a particular health finding or an automatic rule about suspending or continuing payments. Those matters required the appropriate case and contract assessment.
The outcome was a more usable route for 106 people and a clear account of fourteen cases still needing work. I did not describe the channel launch as complete access for all 120. The operating lesson was to preserve the purpose of verification while examining whether the organisation had made one method unnecessarily decisive. Assistance and alternatives could be funded without pretending that a customer’s difficulty using the original route told us everything we needed to know about the person or the underlying obligation.