Comments
All that Gowramma from Mayasandra village near Bangalore had to do for buying an insurance cover of Rs 25,000 was to get herself a bank account and set aside Rs 33.09 — for a whole year — from her kitty. At a little over 10 paise for Rs 1,000 a day, the micro-insurance product is something that's well within her reach.
As part of its financial inclusion initiative, Syndicate Bank has tied up with private insurer Tata AIG Life Insurance to launch its micro-insurance scheme. “Along with our bank products such as savings bank account, deposits and loan products, we thought it better to have a micro-insurance product which would go a long way for residents of villages, those with lower income and cannot afford to pay higher premium for life insurance cover,” said Mr Ravi Chatterjee, Executive Director, Syndicate Bank, while launching the product.
Insurance cover
The insurance product will offer both life and accident cover. According to him, the bank has a large network of branches in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and the national capital region (NCR), and “we will focus on these three areas for this product,” he said. The bank was also planning to come out with new products and the same product with different amount of cover, depending on the demand for this micro-insurance product and those staying the commanding areas of these villages.
Mr M. Anand, Senior Vice-President and Head – Alternate Channels, Tate AIG Life Insurance, told Business Line that his company was in talks with other banks for financial inclusion. “It could be the same product too. Product development is going on now, and it will take a couple of months for us to come out with new products,” he said.
Through this relationship with Syndicate Bank, the insurer plans to cover five lakh lives by 2012. Syndicate Bank has been allotted 750 villages in the first phase and “we would work with business correspondents and branches to reach out to these villages,” said Mr Anand. The bank has been allotted a total of 1,493 villages with a population of over 2,000 to be covered before March 2012, and has so far opened 3.5 lakh no-frill accounts.
Pricing
On the pricing, he said that it was “affordable since it is a group product.” He added, “We see this as a starting point to go bottom up and reach out to a larger mass, and this is the first-of-its-kind product that we are getting into in this space.”
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.