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Life Insurance Corporation of India has outdone its private peers in settling death claims in 2013-14, according to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India.
“The claims settlement ratio of LIC was better than that of the private life insurers,” the regulator said in its annual report.
Claims rejectionLIC’s individual death claims settlement ratio increased to 98.14 per cent during the last fiscal compared with 97.73 per cent in 2012-13. For private insurers, the settlement ratio had gone down marginally to 88.31 per cent, compared with 88.65 per cent during the previous year, the regulator said. The regulator said private sector life insurers have been rejecting about 8.03 per cent of the claims as against 1.10 per cent by LIC. “Private insurers had repudiated more (10,036) number of claims when compared to (8,387) of LIC,” the report said.
Industry performanceThe industry’s settlement ratio had slightly increased to 96.75 per cent in 2013-14 from 96.41 per cent in 2012-13 and the repudiation ratio had remained almost at the same level of 2.08 per cent in 2013-14.
Interestingly, during last fiscal, private life insurers closed more offices than they opened. They closed 732 offices and opened 166.
On the other hand, LIC established 1313 new offices and closed none, which resulted in a net increase of 1313 offices in the public sector.
LIC opened a number of micro offices during the reporting year as mandated by the previous UPA Government, to push financial inclusion.
Number of agentsThe industry saw a 3.1 per cent growth in the number of individual agents during 2013-14. The number has gone up to 21.88 lakh as on March 31, 2014 from 21.22 lakh as on March31, 2013. While the private life insurers recorded an increase of 4.5 per cent, LIC showed an increase of 2 per cent.
LIC has more number of individual agents than all private life insurers put together.
At the end of 2013-14, the number of agents with LIC stood at 11.96 lakh, while the corresponding number for private sector insurers was 9.92 lakh.
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