Aviva Life Insurance, a private life insurer, is seeing increased demand for protection products and wants to ride the “protection wave” in the post Covid-19 world, a top official said.

This life insurer is already a big proponent of guaranteed products, which is on the rise since April, and plans to roll out more such offerings in the coming days, Anjali Malhotra, Chief Customer, Marketing, Digital and IT Officer, Aviva Life Insurance, told BusinessLine .

It sees guaranteed products as one of the key focus areas in the new normal brought about by the pandemic.

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Elaborating on the just-launched Aviva New Wealth Builder (ANWB), an endowment product that has twin benefits of protection and investment besides a Guaranteed Plan, Malhotra said guaranteed products have seen higher traction and offtake in the post Covid-19 world, prompting the company to come up with revisions.

The ANWB is the new revamped version of the Aviva Wealth Builder, introduced in 2012, and made more attractive to customers in terms of flexible payment frequency, relaxing the age limit up to which the product can be bought, besides providing guaranteed returns. For Aviva, the lion’s share of business comes from guaranteed products.

“At Aviva, we understand that in these unique and uncertain times, people are looking for security, especially since the economy and market have felt a strong impact of the pandemic. We are now offering the New Wealth Builder with a reassurance guarantee built into the plan.

“Our message to customers is that despite the uncertainty, they must look forward to tomorrow with hope and continue making plans for their key life goals with confidence, armed with guaranteed returns behind the certainty of the goal,” she said.

She highlighted that guaranteed products give comfort to customers. “We realised after Covid-19 that uptake was going to grow higher because of the kind of uncertainty. In an environment where there is uncertainty and ambiguity, people like to stick to instruments where you can get a certain form of guarantee. Now that risk-taking ability has gone lower, we had therefore relooked at Aviva Wealth Builder and made it attractive for customers in a few ways,” she added.

Aviva has therefore, increased the age limit of people who can buy ANWB to 60 years (from 50 earlier in the previous Wealth Builder plan) and changed the frequency by allowing people to pay in smaller instalments.

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Going forward, Aviva Life intends to look at the ULIP market and see what kind of changes could made to its products in the unit-linked domain. Plans are afoot to launch a couple of term offerings too in the near future, Malhotra said.

Over the period April-September 2020, Aviva Life’s retail business grew 28 per cent on a year-on-year basis. The number of policies in Aviva’s retail business recorded a growth of 15 per cent during the same period.

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