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| Edited By: Nandini Goswami |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 29, 2018, 06:08 AM IST
Aegon Religare Life Insurance, which is completing a year’s operations in the life space, will invest Rs 130 crore over the next 6 months to take its total equity capital to Rs 525 crore by the close of the fiscal.
Most of the additional capital would be used to building up its scale of distribution.
K S Gopalakrishnan, CFO and appointed actuary, Aegon Religare Life Insurance, told DNA Money, “The overall market is challenging at present, but there is much scope. We will be experimenting with products and build up the distribution channels significantly.
Our agency force would be raised from 4,500 now to 12,000 by 2009-10 end.”
Working on a new business premium (NBP) target of Rs 215 crore, the company is also exploring a number of products in the health and annuity space. In the first five months of the current fiscal, it raked in a NBP of Rs 34 crore.
Asked how the company would garner the targeted new business premium, Gopalakrishnan said, “We are working on a differentiated branding on one hand… we are also experimenting with different products. The company launched the cheapest term insurance product, which was followed up by other companies”.
Gopalakrishnan said the company offers the third-most cheap term policy at present and is also planning to review its pricing once again. “Since this business is push-oriented, offering innovative products backed by cheap prices is ideal from the customer perspective. The latest Ulip offering, which is a modified product on the latest Irda guidelines, is also the cheapest among all Ulips,” he said.
The company has also invested Rs 50 crore towards IT spends for faster connectivity.
Although not into traditional products, the company is weighing plans to come up with products which have both savings and insurance in it. These could be some kind of guaranteed plans too. The strategy is more to do with the recent restriction on charges in unit-linked plans.
The company may choose to learn from its foreign partner Aegon, which is one of the largest in the annuities space in UK, to develop its own annuity product by this fiscal.
