Aegon Religare Online Innovation, up to 60% Savings on Life Insurance

by Leplan on July 30th, 2011 4

Yateesh Today I attended a Bloggers Meet hosted by Aegon Religare and got opportunity to learn about various innovations done by the game in the online space. One of them is to launch the first Online Customized Product called iTerm, an exclusively online Term Insurance Plan.

The product was launched 22 months back, and now the online sales accounts for 10% of overall volume. The total insured amount crosses INR 8,300 crore (USD 1.8 B) today. The online initiative is led by Chief Marketing Officer Yateesh Srivastava, which is well supported by Director of Marketing Harshal Shah. I was fortunate enough to meet both of them today.

My Discussion with Yateesh

is an Ex-Rediff guy and he understands the online space inside-out. Even though 90% of the current business comes from offline channel, Yateesh is spending 35% of his budget in online channels. He is confident about bringing more business from the Web.

The biggest point he made is when he said there are more people online than people watching TV (102M vs 95 M) in India. The number can only grow and it is expected that India will have 1 billion online people by next decade.

People are coming online from PCs and Smartphones, and the 3G penetration is going to fuel the coming growth. Yateesh feels 3G services need to improve to enable mass in-flow, and believes this will happen.

When asked about his Marketing plans and partners, he says he explores everything possible and have multiple partner agencies working for him. Interestingly he plans to spend 25% of the Digital Marketing Budget in Social Media, which is a excellent news for New Media Ecosystem.

He has much bigger goals from the online initiatives he has taken. When asked about the goal, he said there is no cap and he is working hard to get the maximum business possible. Any number seems smaller to him at this point.

About iTerm and iMaximize.

The first question came to my mind is — Why are they revolutionary products? After hearing to Yateesh and Harshal, I am convinced that the products are really revolutionary and are poised for something really big.

iTerm is a Term Insurance product while iMaximize is a ULIP. These are exclusively online products and thus come with huge cost advantage to the company, which is passed directly to the consumers, says Harshal. It cuts the distribution costs and the Insurance Agents are by-passed.

If you are not aware, Insurance Agents are given a commission at the range of 35 to 45% of the monthly premium. When sold online, the cost is saved and Yateesh claims that the monthly premium for same Insurance Amount when compared to offline plan is around 50 to 60%.

This reminds me of RedBus and BigBazaar, who actually brought the revolution in Indian Bus Travel and Retail by cutting down supply cost. RedBus actually cut-off the middle man in the Bus Ticketing Industry, thus passing the benefit to the consumers.

When I mentioned this comparison to Yateesh, he says not RedBus but they are the ‘Maruti of Online Insurance‘.

Ending Thoughts

Extremely visionary and well executed plan. I am completely bought by Yateesh’s and Harshal’s views. If I have to buy a Life Insurance plan, nothing better than taking some time and using a self-serve system to save the massive cost. There might be a risk, while doing the self-serve though.

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