Private non-life insurer ICICI Lombard General Insurance expects its group business to rise to 33 percent of its total business over the next three to five years from 27-28 percent right now.
In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Alok Agarwal, Executive Director, ICICI Lombard General Insurance said the rise in group business will be due to improvement in premium rates and also because corporate employees are now actively seeking group health covers from their employers.
"There has been an improvement in pricing across group products. Even in segments like group health, we are hoping for an improvement in prices. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, there is an increased awareness about health products among corporate customers," he added.
Agarwal said the group segment has been seeing a higher growth on the back of improvement in pricing. He said the group business is seeing a 17-18 percent growth on a yearly basis.
Between April 1 and November 30 (FY21), ICICI Lombard had a gross direct premium of Rs 9,304.62 crore, a 3.06 percent YoY growth. The market share of ICICI Lombard stands at 7.28 percent, making it the third-largest general insurer and the largest private sector insurer.
ICICI Lombard has also partnered with employee health insurance startup Plum to offer technology-backed group health insurance products.
As part of this partnership, ICICI Lombard and Plum intend to solve four major areas of group health insurance--realtime pricing, onboarding, policy management and claims.
In the area of pricing, it takes anywhere between five days to a couple of weeks for a company to receive a price estimate for a group health insurance policy. This happens due to a largely manual process of going through the data set and assessing the risk.
ICICI Lombard and Plum in close collaboration, have built automated processes around data cleaning, validation, fraud detection, and underwriting thereby reducing the time taken to receive price estimates to a few minutes.
Going forward, Agarwal said the idea is to offer policies to group customers that are custom-built for their needs.
"Wellness-linked insurance plans are getting popular as also products around emerging risks like cyber insurance. We are well equipped to handle these risks and offer tailor-made solutions," he added.
Among the various sectors taking group insurance, Agarwal said IT/ITeS has shown clear signs of revival as also pharmaceuticals and speciality chemical firms.
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