COVID-19 impact sees a whopping 106% rise in retail health policy sales

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Mumbai: Driven by pandemic-specific policy sales, mid-sized non-life player Future Generali Insurance Company has seen its retail health policy sales soar over 106% during the first three quarters of the current financial year.

Future Generali has sold around 30 lakh pandemic covers (Covid Rakshak and Covid Kavach), which has boosted its retail health sales by over 106.5% between April and December as against around 38.3% for the industry, its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Anup Rau said.

He also said that despite claims from pandemic cases, the company has posted a marginal increase in net income in the first half at Rs 88.2 crore as against Rs 75.6 crore in the year-ago period.

The company was founded by the Future Group in joint venture with the Italian financial services group Generali in 2007.

Rau partly attributed this to the overall improvement in sales, especially fire and motor products and also to overall productivity increase despite the lockdown, which has grown in high double digits.

While motor own damage (OD) insurance grew over 10.5% for the company as against 2.1% for the industry, non-motor sales increased 27% during the period as against a meagre 5.9% for the industry.

Overall, the company grew close to 10.5%, making it the second-fastest growing player with the market share among private general insurers at 3.8%, marginally up from 3.5% last year.

Terming the motor products as a lazy business for all insurers as this is the mainstay for the industry with over 40% volume share, Rau said that the lockdown has ensured that the industry sold more household and SME products than motor this year (as the auto sales still lag), and this should continue going forward.  He said that for too long, the company has been a motor-only industry, which is a lazy business for anyone of us.

“Thankfully, our non-motor share has gone up significantly this year– from 70:30 t0 63: 37 now and this will go up further,” Rau added.

Meanwhile, the company has also launched a fully automated car inspection facility for renewals and claims. Currently, car inspection is dominated by manual inspections, which is a people-intensive job leading to delays in the claims and policy issuance process.

Under the artificial intelligence-based inspection process, end-customers capture photos or videos of a car for policy renewals and claim assessment.