SPOTLIGHT
ING Vysya Life Insurance Company Limited -- Kamatla Sheeba
ING Vysya Life Insurance Company entered the private life insurance industry in India in September 2001. It has established itself as a distinctive life insurance brand with an innovative, attractive and customer-friendly product portfolio and a professional advisor force in a short span of six years of operations. ING Vysya Life Insurance is a joint venture among five partners—ING Insurance, ING Vysya Bank, Exide Industries Limited, Gujarat Ambuja Cements Limited and Enam Group.
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
COVR STORY
Microinsurance : A Beneficiary Perspective -- Radha Mohan Chebolu
Unlike the regular insurance, microinsurance business is primarily geared towards the unorganized sector. It lays stress on formulating and implementing pro-active strategies that can help in ameliorating the economic grievances of Below Poverty Line (BPL) households. Since `beneficiary assessment' is a vital component in `microinsurance' sector, one needs to frame the agenda towards this direction. What needs to be done is to make microinsurance programs across the country more `client-friendly'. Microinsurance firms should make an attempt to fine-tune the existing framework of operations with a `service culture'.
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
REINSURANCE
Sidecars : Reinsuring the Reinsurers -- Jayshree Bose
Reinsurance sidecars have emerged very recently as resourceful players, enabling sponsor-reinsurers to tide over the problem of resource crunch, apart from offering a host of benefits to sponsors and investors alike. Is this mechanism likely to eclipse other alternative risk transfer (ART) mechanisms, or, will they all continue to co-exist, offering multiple risk transfer opportunities in a global financial sector where the lines between capital markets and insurance continue to get obliterated?
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
HEALTH INSURANCE
Health Insurance : What More Should Insurers Do? -- G V Rao
The health insurance sector is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of about 50%—the highest growth rate among all non-life insurance segments. However, despite the growth, the insurers have been losing money overall. They do not seem to know the specific sources of leakages and how to restructure the features of the product, to make it more popular and financially less painful to them. In short, health insurance needs a sophisticated risk management approach
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
CATASTROPHE RISK
Insurability of Natural Catastrophes : Capacity Building for Indian Market -- R Chandrasekharan
One of the short-comings of the Indian insurance industry is the lack of credible data to simulate potential loss from a natural catastrophe of a high severity. At best, insurance companies are following an aggregate loss model whereby they assess the impact of a natural catastrophe by analyzing the severity of a single event applied to their portfolio.
© 2007 IRDA Journal. Reprinted with permission.
CATASTROPHE RISK
Catastrophic Renewals : The More Information, The Better -- Ben Beazley
In coping with future catastrophic events, risk managers need to be adaptive and opt for the best insurance coverage available. This will help them prune down the heavy losses associated with atastrophes.
© 2007 Risk and Insurance Management Society, Inc. Reprinted with permission.
REGULATION
Special Discount in Insurance Premium in Lieu of Agency Commission: Consumer View -- L P Gupta
Direct marketing of insurance products benefits the insurance consumers by reducing the cost of insurance by way of special discount in insurance premium in lieu of agency commission. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority and the insurance companies should permit and promote direct marketing services to individual customers for a qualitative and profitable growth of the industry.
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
REGULATION
Grievance Redressal Machinery in Insurance -- G Gopalakrishna
As a welfare dispensing scheme, insurance not only provides social security measures but also ensures that the grievance redressal mechanism is effective. The two legal dispute settlement mechanisms—Insurance Ombudsman Scheme and Consumer Protection Act—complemented by the Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (Protection of Policyholders' Interest) Regulations, 2002, ensure the benefits of insurance to the consumers by providing proper redressal of their grievances, in a cost-effective, efficient and impartial manner.
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
Climate and Hurricanes : What Happened in 2006? -- David A Lalonde
After the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, everybody expected 2006 to be more of the same. So what happened?
© 2007 American Academy of Actuaries. Reprinted with permission
NON-LIFE INSURANCE
Going It Alone -- Elisabeth Boone
Proudly independent, Colemont Insurance Brokers scores big with construction risks. The sole aim of the company is to serve its retail agents and bring the right risk to the apt market.
© 2007 Rough Notes Magazine. The article was first published in the February 2007 issue of Rough Notes Magazine. Reprinted with permission.
LIFE INSURANCE
Reading the Restrictive Clauses -- VNS Pillai
Understanding the restrictive and exclusion clauses enables a customer to enjoy life insurance cover to the fullest. A customer's entitlements and non-entitlements will be clear when he reads the policy document. Insurers are very clear and transparent on all these fronts; they publish every aspect, restriction and exclusion for each product in the policy document itself. However, most customers refuse to read these restrictive clauses and get enlightened. If the customers themselves are not interested in reading the clauses, who then is to be blamed?
© 2007 IUP . All Rights Reserved
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