LIC in favour of distribution tie-up with postal dept

Hyderabad, Nov 5: 

Life Insurance Corporation of India is in favour of having a distribution tie-up with the Indian Postal Department, which has plans in the insurance sector of its own.

Efforts are underway to enable the Indian Postal Department to enter the insurance market and compete with existing players, currently dominated by LIC.

“They (the postal department) have a huge network. It will be prudent to have some kind of distribution synergy between the department and LIC. We are in favour of such a synergy,” D.K. Mehrotra, Chairman, told Business Line on the sidelines of the inauguration of the All India LIC Games here today.

The Government has launched an initiative to pave the way for over 1.5 lakh post offices in the country to offer full-fledged banking and insurance services.

Postal Life Insurance is also setting up a full-fledged investment division for generating optimal returns.

Vision 2020

 

Mehrotra said LIC’s newly chalked out Vision 2020 to have every Indian backed by a LIC policy was a “daunting task”, but the company was making all out efforts to achieve this.

He said different groups have been set up to draw up a roadmap for this vision, including branch expansion, recruitment and launching of new products.

In this context, he said the company would come out with its second and third online products.

“We have one online product and we will come out with two more in the next two or three months. While the first one is in the pension category, the two new ones will be simple endowment-related products. We do not want to put any complex products online yet,” he said.

Admitting that the insurance industry faced a challenging period in the first half of the fiscal, Mehrotra said the second half would see a turnaround of sorts.

He expects the industry and LIC to end the year with a 10 per cent growth. 

Source : The Hindu Business Line