While the life insurance sector grew 6% on individual annualised premium equivalent (APE) basis, Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance individual APE of ABSL between April and November 2018 was up 62 per cent to Rs 93.81 billion, whereas the average growth among private players stood at 11 per cent for the same period.
Pankaj Razdan, Managing Director and chief executive office. ABSI, said, “When I took over in 2014, we decided to transform the company and build a business that could absorb all shocks that may come at any point in time. One of the fundamental shifts at ABSL was building instruments to measure ‘trust surplus’, which means focusing on “qualitative and sustainable” aspects rather than just the numbers.
“We wanted to create a new business model which was isolated from the normal ‘push and pull’ of the insurance business,” he said.
A natural result of this was that over the past few years, there have been layoffs of ABSL as several areas need fixing to boost productivity. Explaining that Insurance sales and the agency channel has had its history of flaws, he said. ” Instead of saying ‘take this product’, we are asking customers what they need. Therefore, as they ‘discover’ the product or policy, there is a higher chance of them buying it. We are opening options for customers based on their preferences.
“We found through our research that only about 5% of advisors were trusted by customers. Therefore, there were large un-served pools of customers and a large pool of advisors who were not aligning themselves with each other,” he said.
“Through our innovation lab, we have created ‘cognitive’ tools that are able to help customers find their blindspots while ‘discovering’ the product. These tools help the advisors address these ‘blindspots’ through specific strategies,” he added.
