Weekly Insurance Round-up Tuesday, June 21, 2022

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We're back with the next edition of Beshak's Weekly News Round-up - an analysis of all Insurance News & Updates, straight from our research desk! Don't forget to share your feedback with us, and give us a thumbs up if you find this helpful! 

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✴️ Non-life insurers’ gross premium income grew by 24% in May 📈

✴️ Bengaluru-based Insurtech platform Pazcare raises $8.2 million 💰

✴️ Insurers demanding more relaxations from IRDAI 🤝

• As per this IRDAI report, the gross direct premium underwritten by Life Insurance companies increased by 24% in May 2022.
• The overall premium underwritten by all the non-life insurers was ₹15,404.45/-  Cr. for May 2022. It was ₹12,423.98/- Cr. in May 2021. 
• The private non-life insurers’ gross direct premium underwritten for May 2022 was ₹13,566.18/- which was 23.84% more than ₹10,954.18/- in May 2021.
• Up to May 2022, the gross direct premium underwritten for 25 general insurance companies grew 22.62%  at ₹ 33,221.70 Cr.
• The standalone private insurers’ gross direct premium underwritten also increased by 23.58% to ₹1,708.86/- Cr. from ₹1,312.71/- Cr.
• For standalone private insurers, the gross direct premium up to May 2022 increased by 26.17% at ₹3,259.01 Cr.
• The 2 specialised PSU insurers saw an increase of 48.60% in their gross underwritten premium, which increased from ₹87.09 Cr. to ₹129.42 Cr.
• Up to May, the gross direct premium written by the 2 specialised PSUs increased to ₹199.99 Cr. from ₹190.94 Cr. - indicating an increase of 4.73%.

Source: Financial Express

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• Pazcare, an insurtech platform, has raised $8.2 Mn in Series A funding led by Jafco Asia. Existing investors like 3One4 Capital and BEENEXT also participated in the round.
• Pazcare is a health insurtech platform that was founded in 2021 by Manish Mishra and Sanchit Malik. Pazcare lets its users design, administer, and manage their employee benefits program and is serving more than 1,30,000 members on the platform to date.
• Pazcare aims to expand its offering beyond healthcare and intends to become a one-stop shop for all kinds of employee benefits. It also has plans to onboard around 2,000 companies over the next few quarters.
• Currently, Pazcare has insured employees of over 500 companies including Mindtickle, Mamaearth, Levi's, CashKaro, and Open Financial, among others.

Source: The Hans India

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• The IRDAI has made several relaxations, which are a sigh of relief for the insurers. These new changes are being brought to increase insurance penetration.
• Debashish Panda, IRDAI’s new chairman, is reviewing many sectoral regulations and is currently in the process of relaxing many of them.
• Recently, the IRDAI extended the ‘Use and File’ procedure for most life insurance products. Now life insurers need not take prior approval from the regulator before launching any new products. The same decision was taken for Non-Life and Reinsurers as well.
• The IRDAI has also brought down the number of offline returns submitted by the life insurer to four from forty and the online returns to five from eight.
• While the IRDAI has started making several relaxations, Insurers want even more regulatory relaxations from IRDAI like - 
  • Concession in the Licence renewal fee
    • Insurers are demanding concessions in licence renewal fees to achieve higher penetration in under-penetrated areas. The current fees for IRDAI registration and renewal fee is a percentage of the total premium earned by the insurers.
  • Increasing the incontestability period in case of life insurance policy to 5 years from 3 years
    • A surge in fraudulent claims has made the insurers ask for this change. This will help to curb fraudulent life insurance claims and their delayed reporting.
  • Allowing multi-level marketing
    • Insurance experts say that while multi-level marketing is not prohibited, pyramid schemes and circulation schemes are. Network marketing constitutes a huge population of distributors who have huge customer relationships and can help increase insurance penetration. Since they operate on a variable cost model, it will also help reduce the cost of distribution for insurance companies.

Source: MoneyLife

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