The shift towards customer-centric offerings that address mortality risk while rewarding healthier behaviours has the potential to transform the relationship between insurers and customers. As people live longer, insurers have an opportunity to engage earlier, promote greater financial awareness and preparedness, and support customers in building long-term savings for the next phase of life.
Ajai Kumar Tripathi, Chief and Appointed Actuary, Aviva India Life Insurance
India is home to the world’s largest youth cohort, with nearly 65% of its population below the age of 35. While this demographic advantage remains a source of strength, India cannot overlook the rapid demographic transition underway.
Reports indicate that India’s elderly population (60 years and above) will soar to 230 million by 2036. At the same time, life expectancy has also risen to 71.03 years in 2026, a 0.29% increase from 2025.
Greater access to nutrition, healthcare, and wellness has strengthened the need for financial awareness, independence, and sustainability during the retirement years. This is further driven by improvements in life expectancy, a demographic shift towards an ageing population, and evolving macroeconomic trends that are reshaping employment patterns.
Different customer segments have distinct financial needs. As these needs evolve, access to a broader range of financial and insurance solutions becomes increasingly important.
As a consequence of the fundamental restructuring, demographic shifts, and changing personal circumstances, the life insurance industry has significant potential to address the long-term financial needs – focus on personalized and suitability-based insurance requirements – that provides holistic coverage for diverse set of risks exposures.
Alongside traditional protection needs, growing longevity and retirement requirements are creating greater demand for solutions that help customers prepare for longer lives.
Globally, life insurers have evolved beyond traditional protection products to offer a broader range of solutions that help customers meet long-term savings, retirement, and wealth-accumulation needs, while continuing to provide protection against life’s uncertainties.
The range of life insurance products designed to address post-employment income needs includes guaranteed lifetime income solutions, various annuity and pension products, as well as associated tax benefits. These solutions also extend to more sophisticated cashflow management approaches, including unit-linked and index-linked platforms, systematic withdrawal plans, income drawdown arrangements and reverse mortgage schemes, where home equity may be used to purchase a whole-life annuity from a life insurer. These products offer the flexibility to address the diverse and evolving needs of customers.
Life insurance penetration in India stood at just 2.8% in India, highlighting how while more households are living longer and facing higher medical and retirement expenses, a large part of them remain without adequate life cover.
For insurers, this gap represents not only a commercial opportunity but also a responsibility to understand risk more accurately and design solutions that help families navigate longer lives with greater financial confidence. Though anchored in numbers, insurance is largely driven by human stories. Designing an insurance product is akin to embedding security into someone’s daily life.
Supporting ageing with dignity
Traditionally viewed as a safety net, the role of life insurance increasingly extends across a customer’s financial lifecycle from protection during income-earning years to savings and retirement solutions that help provide financial security later in life. To promote greater financial independence and reduce reliance on government-supported retirement schemes, various tax benefits are also available for products offered through life insurance and pension schemes.
Actuaries are instrumental in developing financially viable and sustainable insurance products and have developed sophisticated risk-management techniques through complex predictive modelling. With longevity in the picture, the challenge is to balance several considerations simultaneously.
Products must remain relevant and affordable for customers while life insurers must carefully set and monitor the assumptions to demonstrate financial strength, maintain adequate capital and high-quality assets to back liabilities, withstand future uncertainties, and ensure long-term financial viability.
Longer life expectancy, rising guarantee costs, and greater market volatility require actuaries to strike a careful balance between customer affordability and insurer sustainability. Their role is to ensure products remain relevant and accessible, while maintaining the financial strength needed to meet long-term commitments and navigate future uncertainties.
Through the careful evaluation of risk-adjusted returns, capital requirements, and timely corrective actions for supporting financial resilience, actuaries help maintain a balance between risk-taking capacity and the financial stability of life insurers.
Factors influencing actuarial assessments
Prevention, healthier lifestyles, and proactive health management are becoming increasingly important in consumer decision-making. Consumers, both young and old, have greater access to information about nutrition, fitness, preventive screenings, and lifestyle choices. At the same time, digital technologies are creating new ways for individuals to understand and engage with their health.
India’s health and wellness market grew from USD 164.35 Billion in 2025 to USD 172.73 Billion this year and is projected to reach USD 257.94 Billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 5.14% from 2026-2034.
Preventive healthcare is important because risk is not necessarily static throughout an individual’s life. Regular health checks, early identification of risk factors, and sustained improvements in lifestyle can potentially influence long-term health outcomes.
Moreover, with over a billion adults between the ages of 30-79 living with hypertension in India , the real opportunity in prevention lies in incorporating AI-enabled screening, teleconsults, personalised lifestyle coaching and wearables into insurance offerings. This can enable policyholders to focus on staying healthy and financially resilient.
From an actuarial perspective, this creates opportunities to assess a broader range of risk factors and manage longevity risks in a more holistic and data-driven manner. Traditional underwriting has typically relied on factors such as age, medical history, and other established risk indicators. Increasingly, insurers can also consider how broader health and wellness trends may influence mortality and longevity over time.
Data-driven insights can improve the predictability of such risks, while technology can enable the development of more sophisticated, structured, and customised insurance solutions. Greater use of data also places a responsibility on insurers and actuaries to uphold fairness, transparency, privacy, and responsible data governance.
For Life Insurers, understanding such trends can improve the quality of actuarial assessments, while also encouraging the development of propositions through positive engagement for improving the quality of risks underwritten as well as reward for better risk management and provide financial incentives that support customers in achieving their financial goals.
With India’s preventive market estimated to reach USD 500 billion by 2030, focusing on prevention, early detection, and holistic care can improve long-term health outcomes for the insured population.
Deepening the human-centric approach of insurance
The shift towards customer-centric offerings that address mortality risk while rewarding healthier behaviours has the potential to transform the relationship between insurers and customers. As people live longer, insurers have an opportunity to engage earlier, promote greater financial awareness and preparedness, and support customers in building long-term savings for the next phase of life.
There are growing opportunities to reward customers through health-management programmes delivered in collaboration with healthcare providers. Such initiatives can help encourage healthier lifestyles and better disease management. Active engagement during the accumulation phase, coupled with built-in rewards for healthier behaviours, can ultimately support greater financial freedom when customers need it most.
Actuaries are the storytellers who ensure these everyday stories don’t fall apart when the unexpected happens. The future of life insurance will still be about protecting families but increasingly, it will also be about helping people prepare for the welcome possibility of living longer, healthier lives.
After all, health is not a luxury but a responsibility we owe to ourselves and those who depend on us.