Debasish Panda,chairman,IRDAI
“Indian insurance companies on an average have provided a return of 23 per cent while US insurance industry’s return has been at 13 per cent, a point to note for our American counterparts,’’ said Panda, while addressing a webinar organised by CII on “Enhancing Indo-US Collaboration in the Insurance Sector,’’ on Wednesday
“We will be soon launching “Bima Sugam” a digital platform for selling, servicing, and settling claims. It is a plug-and-play solution with an API interface. presume this platform would be a game changer as far as insurance is concerned,” Panda said
Hyderabad:
IRDAI chairman Debasish Panda has said Indian insurance sector has given relatively a higher return on equities to the players than the developed markets and geographies.
“Indian insurance companies on an average have provided a return of 23 per cent on their equity investment while US insurance industry’s return has been at 13 per cent, a point to note for our American counterparts,’’ said Panda, while addressing a webinar organised by CII on “Enhancing Indo-US Collaboration in the Insurance Sector,’’ on Wednesday.
After two decades of liberalisation, the Indian insurance industry has reached an inflection point and ready to leapfrog,’’ he said adding that any American collaboration will be a win-win for US investors and Indian insurance industry.
` Among the life insurers, Max life has given the highest return of 19 per cent followed by HDFC Life at 18 per cent, SBI Life at 15 per cent, ICICI Prudential life at 12 per cent.
Similarly, in the general insurance space, ICICI Lombrad General Insurance has given a return of 22 per cent, followed by HDFC Ergo General Insurance at 21 per cent, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance at 20 per cent and Reliance General Insurance at 13 per cent.
Premium in the Indian insurance industry has gone up from $5.6 billion in 2000 to $115 billion in 2021-22 and IRDAI has set an aspirational premium target of $ 500 billion of premium by 2027, a growth of 34 per cent, he said.
There is now a paradigm shift in the regulatory outlook and framework with a focus on ease of doing business. The industry should get more freedom and flexibility as IRDAI is moving from rule based regulatory regime to a principle based one, he explained.
` Insurance premium as a percentage of GDP has doubled in the last 10 years. With increasing penetration, greater coverage, higher customer trust and digitisation, we want to grow exponentially in numbers and will have a quantum jumps after building a very mature and robust industry in the last two decades,’’ said Panda.
There are underpenetrated segments in the Indian insurance industry like property, healthcare, SME, long term products like retirement which have tremendous potential for insurance sector,’’ he pointed out.
Household income is growing at twice the rate of per capital GDP and India is becoming a pre-eminent digital economy with initiatives like UPI , fastag, startups. Today the country has 100 unicorns and 300 insurtechs. Financial inclusion has happened in the last five to seven years is unprecedented, he said.
The registration process of new companies has been eased by substantially reducing the time taken to process new applications from 6-8 months to two, he said.
“We will be soon launching “Bima Sugam” a digital platform for selling, servicing, and settling claims. It is a plug-and-play solution with an API interface. presume this (platform) would be a game changer as far as insurance is concerned,” Panda said.