The largest private insurer in the country ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company witness strong growth in the health and auto insurance segments. The interesting thing is, the growth was in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic increased the need for health insurance and heightened the demand for personal mobility.
Sanjeev Mantri, executive director of ICICI Lombard expressed the private mobility becomes the preferred mode of transport for people than the shared mobility thereby boosting the motor insurance category. The company is seeing a multi-year growth phenomenon in the health category. The people will avoid public transport at least in the near term.
Due to the pandemic, this year health insurance, in particular, has seen a huge improvement. As consonance with the General Insurance Council, in the April-October period, health insurance accounted for 29.2 per cent of the premiums collected by non-life insurance firms. It is 25.8 per cent a year ago. The largest share in overall premiums collected retained by the motor insurance but saw its share drop to 31.3 per cent in the same period from 35.3 per cent a year ago.
As compared with a global average of 2.8 per cent, non-life insurance penetration in India is low at 0.97 per cent of GDP. It is lower compared to the average penetration of 1.85 per cent even from an Asia perspective. As consonance to the GI Council data ICICI Lombard General Insurance witnessed its gross direct premium income underwritten increase to 2.44 per cent to Rs 7,994 crore in the same period. In the first half of the year, the company reported a net profit of Rs 814 crore. There was a 32 per cent increase compared to the last year.
ICICI Lombard updated and launched a portfolio of health insurance policies earlier this week. OPD services, donor expenses, super no claim bonus and worldwide cover are some of the newly introduced coverage benefits. Pay as you use is one of the newly introduced policies of ICICI Lombard that allow customers to pay motor insurance depending on their vehicle usage. For targeting the younger generation ICICI Lombard partnered with a prepaid card platform Freepaycard, to launch bite-size insurance products earlier in October.
