Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance Company’s premium income grew 35 per cent in the first quarter of the current fiscal and it expects to better this run rate for the full year, Subhrajit Mukhopadhyay, Chief and Appointed Actuary of the company, said.

The company had registered premium income of ₹228 crore last fiscal (2016-17). Expansion of branch network, agency force and expected increase in bancassurance alliances will help speed up the growth rate in the current year, he said. The expansion of alliances when they happen, will be on the basis of complementary value propositions with new bank partners, he said.

Simultaneously, there is also a focus on quality growth and ensuring that the growth is sustainable, he said. There has been a conscious focus at Edelweiss Tokio Life on improving the 13th month persistency ratio (a benchmark to judge whether customers renew their policies at the end of the first year). This number has improved from 50 per cent three years ago to 72 per cent last year and the next step will be to take that number even higher in the current year, he said. This is being done with better risk profiling of customers and eliminating procedural inefficiencies that resulted in lower renewals.

Asked about trends in customer preferences, Mukhopadhyay said there was an increasing shift towards long-term guaranteed products. Edelweiss Tokio’s long-term guaranteed products offer returns of between 4.5 and 5.5 per cent, he said. Strongly advocating such products, he said that with interest rates generally trending downwards in a secular fashion, this was a very good deal for customers to lock into. About 45 per cent of the company’s premium collections come through such products, he said.

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