Ecommerce changed the way Indians liked to book their tickets and plan their holidays. Ecommerce is currently changing the retail sector in India. Can ecommerce lead to another revolution, this time in the insurance in India?
Are the people of India reluctant to switch from an offline to an online distribution model? Is online shopping a fad of the rich and affluent only? It is questions like these and many others that InsuringIndia.com, a leading online insurance aggregator in India, have attempted to answer. InsuringIndia.com, India’s first multilingual ecommerce portal came up with India’s first white paper on Online Insurance Trends in India.Â
The white paper was released at a seminar which brought together industry experts such as Yashish Dahiya, CEO, Policybazaar.com, Udayan Ray, Editor, Outlook Money, Bhavesh Sharma, MD, InsuringIndia.com and Swami Sharan Sharma, Author and Insurance Expert on a common platform.
The expert panel shared their views on current and future trends in India. Bhavesh Sharma, the man behind the initiative, suggested the absence of any existing research on online insurance in India led to the white paper. His team compared the primary data of InsuringIndia visitors across three product categories namely; Health, Motor and Term Insurance.
Some key trends are summarized below:
1 out of every 3 visitors is from smaller towns – less than 10 lakh population – which incidentally have the maximum internet density, even better than top 8 metros
Health Insurance
• Average age of online health insurance shopper is 39.9 years
• More than 50% of the population is looking for a cover size between INR 3.5 lakh to 4.5 lakh
• Average national online health insurance cover is INR 4.2 lakh
• Average health shopper in smaller cities is demanding bigger cover sizes compared to fellow citizens from big metros
• Almost 80% shoppers are looking for Family Floater products
• 2 out of every 5 people looking for health insurance are aged between 30 to 39 years
• The middle aged population (30 to 49 years) accounts for 2 out of 3 online health insurance visitors
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Term Insurance
• Top 5 states make up for almost 60% demand against a population share of almost 30%
• The urban term insurance demand is equally distributed amongst the bigger and smaller cities at 50% each
• The average term insurance seekers start at 31 years
• 1 out of every 2 shoppers is aged between 30 to 39 years
• 9 out of 10 shoppers are from age group of 20 to 49 years
• Average national online term insurance cover is INR 46 lakh
• Average term insurance cover across all 5 regions is more than INR 40 lakh
• 10% of online term insurance shoppers are smokers
• Every 2nd customer is looking for a policy period of 25 years or more
• Females are highly underinsured with only 4% of the total term insurance sample
Motor Insurance
• Almost 90% of the visitors are looking for Comprehensive Policies
• At 56% of the total motor insurance demand, Comprehensive Renewal is the most popular product
• 7 out of every 10 shoppers reported their previous insurer to be a private insurance company
