Life insurers infra investments up, equity assets down in FY16

Infrastructure investments of the life insurance industry has risen by 5.2 per cent to Rs 3,06,492 crore as on March 31. Equity investments (at market value), however, dropped to Rs 5,95,389 crore as of FY16-end, compared to Rs 6,29,967 crore. This, said, insurers, was due to the volatility in the stock markets.

Data from the Life Insurance Council showed that the industry had seen a marginal increase in its branch presence in FY16 to 11,071, from 11,030 in FY15. Industry officials said this was on account of insurers primarily using bank branch networks to sell policies, apart from using other platforms like web aggregators and insurance marketing firms. These also included policies sold through micro-insurance agents and common services centres in rural areas.

Agent attrition continued to be a reality, with the number of individual agents falling to 2.01 million, from 2.06 million in FY15. About 52,300 have quit the industry between April 1, 2015 and March 31.  A slew of measures taken by the regular, including reducing pass percentage for agents and allowing insurers to fix their own persistency formula for agents, has helped in the attrition percentages coming down. However, this still remains a cause of concern for the industry.

With respect to the assets held by the life insurance industry, fixed income saw a 12 per cent growth and rose to Rs 18.8 lakh crore.

 

 
Source: Life Insurance Council