Comments
Aegon Religare Life Insurance Company has been renamed Aegon Life Insurance Company with effect from Monday following Religare’s exit from the joint venture.
The company is among the first life insurance joint ventures in the country to put through the hike in foreign shareholding, after the changes in foreign direct investment regulations, the company’s Managing Director and CEO KS Gopalakrishnan said. All approvals from IRDA and other regulatory authorities are in place, he said.
Speaking on his company’s business plans, Gopalakrishnan said that the insurance market was not homogenous, but heterogeneous, and was maturing.
Consequently, it is not necessary for every company to do ‘everything’; rather it could adopt a segmented approach.
He said Aegon Life Insurance is looking at ‘digital platforms’ as the primary business driver. He said about a third of its new business (in terms of number of customers) comes through the online channel and its online term insurance product is its best seller.
He said persistency ratios (retention of the customer) were higher when they come in through the online channel. The retention rate was 93 per cent for these customers whereas the overall persistency of all customers was in the range of 65 per cent. The profile of the online customer was typically between 35 and 45 years of age, salaried and hailing from among the top 15 cities in the country, Gopalakrishnan said.
“We are still waiting for the tipping point when online sales will boom,” he said, adding that the advent of 4G, and improved and affordable devices will contribute to that. The company expects to generate new business premiums worth about ₹250 crore, a 25 per cent growth over last year, he said.
The company’s re-christening follows a change in the shareholding pattern that saw one of the co-promoters, Bennett, Coleman and Co, picking up Religare’s stake, thus increasing its stake to 48.5 per cent from 30 per cent. The foreign co-promoter Aegon NV increased its stake to 49 per cent from 26 per cent. An employee welfare trust holds the remaining 2.5 per cent.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.