New Delhi:
Max Life Insurance reported a 14 per cent growth in its revenue to reach Rs 4,688 crore in Q3 ending in Dec 19. The shareholders’ profit after tax for Q3FY20 grew by 92 per cent to Rs 154 crore due to one-off gain from successful transition in hedging strategy from IRS to FRA, aided by higher investment income partly offset by shift in product mix towards non participating savings and investments in proprietary channels.
In a first, Max Life’s embedded value (EV) based on market consistent methodology (MCEV) crossed the Rs10,000 core. mark at Rs 10,077 crore . with an operating return on EV (annualised) at 18.4 per cent.
The value of new business (VNB) written during the first nine months of FY20 was Rs 576 crore growing 24 per cent over the previous year, arising from the shift in product mix towards non-par products. The new business margin in the reporting perid was 21 per cent increasing 60 bps over last year.
Individual annual premium equivalent (APE) for Q3FY20 stood at Rs 1,000 crore increasing 16 per cent over the past year, driven by growth in proprietary and bancassurance channels, while other channels too continued to deliver robust sales.
Max Life’s proprietary channel recorded sales of Rs 309 crore in Q3FY20, growing 19 per ent over the previous year and continued to grow faster than the bancassurance channel growth of 14 per cent.
The life insurer's assets under management as of December 31, 2019 were Rs 68,618 crore18 per cent higher than the previous year.
Mohit Talwar, Vice Chairman, Max Group & Managing Director, Max Financial Services, said, “Max Life has outpaced the private life Insurance industry growth by 4 per cent in the first nine months of the current financial year.Due to its strong focus on creating a comprehensive channel mix, Max Life was able to add eight partners for our individual and group business in the third quarter of FY2020.Going forward, we will continue our focus on growing the protection business, seamlessly executing the agency excellence program in tandem with New York Life consultants, and further enhancing our business development endeavours.”
Meanwhile, in an insurtech push, Max Life Insurance has announced the selection of seven start-ups to engage with ‘Max Life Innovation Labs’, the Company’s flagship ‘InsurTech’ accelerator programme.
These seven start-ups were selected from over 151 applicants who have interacted with Max Life over the last two months, and have been selected through a process including application reviews, followed by demo calls with the business teams and mentorship through boot-camps with business heads.
The 15 start-ups shortlisted for the ‘Pitch Day’ presented innovative solutions spanning across conversational artificial intelligence, document parsing, speech recognition, smart underwriting, smart agent/seller hiring and health and wellness technologies and had engaging one-on-one interaction with the program mentors after their pitch presentations.
Commenting on the success of the programme, Prashant Tripathy, CEO and Managing Director, Max Life said, “We believe that these evolving technologies have the power to transform the way we operate and has the potential to reshape the industry. We are planning to give a larger shape to these selected start-up ideas, where working with the aligned partners we aim to create intuitive solutions for the business challenges. With the value that we see in the programme, we will aim to enhance the scope of Max Life Innovation Labs in the coming times as well to continuously remain engaged and bring greater innovation to the ecosystem.”
Integrating the sectoral know-how into everyday insurtech business model, the selected start-ups will now engage with Max Life to complete proof of concepts (POCs) on the selected use cases. They will also get access to data and technology infrastructure for testing their concepts that will help design tech-based solutions for the rapidly advancing life insurance industry.
The selected start-ups will also get an opportunity to receive mentoring from programme partners including Start-up India, AWS, YourNest VC, Blume Ventures, Revstart, Venture Garage to refine their business model, technology guidance, cloud credits, improving business pitch, access to early-stage investment amongst others.