A strong show by its agency channel in December 2020 has raised the confidence of Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance over meeting its last fiscal year performance despite the Covid-induced lockdown challenges impacting business during 2020-21, a top official said.

In December 2020, the agency channel recorded 23 per cent growth in Rated New Business at ₹131 crore as compared to ₹107 crore in same month in previous year. This is even as there was de-growth of about 12 per cent in the agency channel’s contribution during April - December 2020. In terms of the number of policies, there was a year-on-year growth of 10 per cent for the agency channel in December 2020, largely due to increased demand for term policies.

Key challenge

“When the pandemic happened, the biggest worry for us was that face to face meeting with customers was a complete no. As agency channel, how would our agents go and do basic work was a big question mark for us. Thankfully, all the investments we had done to create a digital agency really helped and we could get back to our prime objective of putting our insurance consultants back in action. It’s technology usage that saved the day for us and our agents,” Sameer Joshi, Chief Agency Officer, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, told BusinessLine .

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Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance’s agency force including point of sale persons stood at 1.08 lakh, of which number of agents (excluding POSP) stood at 80,886 persons. In December 2020, the company onboarded 3,000 agents, which is a credible performance given that not a single new agent was onboarded for the first five months this fiscal.

“So far this fiscal, Bajaj Life Insurance has added 12,000 agents. This is a good achievement given that we lost some critical time. We are hopeful of crossing last year’s count. We are now almost at pre-Covid level in terms of business activity,” he said.

Joshi expressed confidence that the private life insurer’s agency channel would be able to achieve last fiscal’s performance in terms of new business of about ₹1,050 crore despite the gap as of end December.

“Going by the current trend, we should able to manage it and I am quite positive about it. Confidence I have got from December 2020 is impressive. Our March 2020 business was impacted due to lockdown in the last week. If we get a big March this year, we should be able to cover it,” he said.

Part-time agents

He also said that Bajaj Allianz Life had a lot of part-time agents and it took lot of work to convince them to accept digital, help them reach out to customers to get the forms filled digitally and teach them how can medicals be done digitally.

“For me the big victory was getting people to adapt to this change. This was a critical thing — for them to accept usage of digital technology,” Joshi said.

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