Reliance Life Insurance, one of the newer private life insurance companies, has registered an almost five-fold increase in premium income to Rs 930.46 crore during 2006-07.
Reliance Life Insurance, one of the newer private life insurance companies, has registered an almost five-fold increase in premium income to Rs 930.46 crore during 2006-07. In its zest to remain on top, the company has been aggressive and is planning a host of new products and infusion of capital over the next couple of years. P Nandagopal, CEO, Reliance Life Insurance, spoke to Nandini Goswami on the company's strategies and shared some insights into industry issues.
You have been one of the fastest growing life insurance companies. What are the key factors that will help you maintain this rate?
We believe that we would achieve high growth in the current year as well. We are clearly focused on need-based selling and our Ulips would continue to be preferred by the market. Growth has been rapid with our expanding distribution reach, superior policy benefits and efficient customer care. As long as these basic factors are taken care of, we feel the market would expand significantly in spite of the current market volatility.
How many new products are you planning over the next few months?
We already have over a dozen products that cater adequately to the protection, savings, long-term investments and pension segment of the business. We plan to introduce some more variants in the coming months.
What is the capital infusion that would be needed to drive the additional business in the current year?
Capital infusion is dependant on the growth and the product mix. We have adequate resources to fully fund our expansion plans that might need over Rs 1,000-1,200 crore of capital in the next few years.
What are your plans for the rural segment?
We are fully focused on the rural segment to develop viable customer-friendly insurance solutions. We have a separate distribution channel that markets rural-specific products. We plan to introduce more such products and expand our distribution reach in these areas.
Do you think your reluctance to enter into bancassurance deals will hit your premium collections?
We do not have tie-ups with large banks due to the current high-cost structure of bancassurance. But we are efficiently and rapidly expanding our alternate distribution channels, which will hopefully give us over 15-20% of our overall new-business premium this year.
What impact do you think the current market turbulence will have on Ulips?
Ulips represent a basket of asset classes like equity, debt and money market instruments. If equity is not the flavour of the markets for any reason, Ulips could shift towards debt or balanced products as it happened in case of mutual funds a few years ago.
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