‘ICICI Pru Life witnessing renewed interest in ULIPs on back of buoyant equity markets’

The pandemic has accelerated awareness of having a sound financial plan, which encapsulates the elements of protection and long-term savings to provide financial security to self and family. This has resulted in increased traction for term insurance products, coupled with critical illness benefits. Likewise, the demand for non-linked saving products, too, has grown since they provide safety of capital and stable returns.

Also, as people live longer, they have access to better healthcare and outlive their savings. This has resulted in increased demand for annuity products. This is reflected in the 159 per cent growth in our annuity business segment in Q1 FY22, compared to same period last year.

In the annuity segment we offer ICICI Pru Guaranteed Pension Plan, which provides customers the flexibility to choose between immediate and deferred annuity, joint life annuity, return of purchase price and increasing annuity. We believe these trends will continue as Covidhas re-emphasised the need for protecting life and income.

Our product development strategy is to identify the latent needs of customers and develop products which addresses this need-gap.

Our well-diversified product mix has resulted in a robust growth in Q1 FY22. Our non-linked saving business registered a strong growth of 66.1 per cent year-on-year. Products such as ‘ICICI Pru Guaranteed Income for Tomorrow (GIFT)’ offer safety of capital while providing customers with an array of income options to choose from. With buoyant equity markets we are witnessing renewed interest in unit-linked products, and this segment registered a growth of 49 per cent in Q1 FY22 over the same period last year.

In Q1 our protection Annualised Premium Equivalent (APE) grew by 26 per cent year-on-year to ₹270 crore. Also, demand for group term products rose sharply as corporates ensured their employees and families had a safety net in these challenging times. By responding proactively to this opportunity early, we grew the group term segment by 80 per cent in Q1 year-on-year.

Significantly, by providing relevant solutions on the protection and savings platform, superior customer service and brand familiarity, the company has achieved an overall market leadership position in terms of new business sum assured, with a market share of 14.7 per cent in Q1 FY22, up from 12.5 per cent in FY21.

We understand customers want to transact where and how they feel most comfortable, including at times using multiple channels during the same purchase. Our multi-channel distribution architecture provides customers the flexibility to choose their preferred mode of purchasing products and placing service requests while offering a seamless experience across each touchpoint.

At present, we have about 700 distribution partnerships across traditional and non-traditional channels. These partnerships have helped in expanding the distribution footprint, making life insurance easily accessible to a cross section of customers, thereby spurring growth.

Lately, we tied up with AU Small Finance Bank, IDFCFirst Bank and RBL Bank, while our new-age distribution partnerships include PhonePe and NSDL Payments Bank, among others. Specifically, our 23 bancassurance partnerships have enabled us expand our reach to 162 million bank customers with a footprint of about 12,000 branches.

Apart from enabling Work From Home, employees in frontline sales and our distribution partners have been equipped with various collaboration tools to provide customers a contactless and frictionless onboarding experience.

Our digital enablers comprising WhatsApp, Mobile App, Website and chatbot LiGo have ensured uninterrupted delivery of service to our customers. Besides, by leveraging digital tools, we have ensured that our claims settlement process remains unaffected.

Our suite of products, distribution strength, robust technology, superior customer service and risk management architecture, enabled us to remain on track to achieve our objective of doubling the FY19 Value of New Business (VNB) by FY23. VNB, we believe, is the most pertinent measure of profitability of a life insurance company. In Q1 FY22 the company registered a strong growth of 78 per cent in its VNB year-on-year and stood at ₹358 crore, and the new business premium grew by 71 per cent to ₹2,559 crore over the same period last year.

We have a well-diversified and balanced distribution mix, which, we believe, is one of the best in the industry. Of the total APE in Q1, bancassurance contributed 38.6 per cent, agency 22.5 per cent, direct 13.1 per cent, group 17.4 per cent and partnership distribution 8.4 per cent.

We are constantly looking at further strengthening our distribution network as well as creating new distribution channels. For instance, while we have more than 191,000 advisors, we recruited over 7,000 agents in the first four months of FY22.

For Q1, our direct business channel contributed 13.1 per cent of the total APE. The direct business comprises of our proprietary sales force and the online channel. This includes the demand generated on our website and our partners’ digital platforms.

In Q1, 95 per cent of new business applications were logged digitally, reflecting the ease of use offered by our device agnostic digital platform.

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