Thaindian News

Chennai, Oct 7 (IANS) Aegon Religare Life Insurance Company has decided to expand its product offering in the online space.

“We have filed with the insurance regulator a unit linked insurance policy (ULIP) to be sold only online. While an online health insurance policy is under development we will also launch an improved new online term assurance policy i-term,” Chief Marketing Officer Yateesh Srivastava told reporters here Thursday.

Happy with the Rs.11-crore premium from its online term assurance policy, mostly from high networth individuals that was not in the company’s fold earlier, the Mumbai-based company, he said, would expand the number of cities where online purchase of policy is possible.

“Currently the online purchase of term assurance policy is available in 42 cities where we have tie-ups with clinical laboratories. As there is a demand for online term assurance policy from other cities we will be expanding there signing up with clinical laboratories to do the medical examination for some policies,” said Srivastava.

Aegon Religare is a three-way joint venture between the Netherlands-based Aegon (holding 26 percent equity), and India’s Religare Enterprises (44 percent) and Bennett and Coleman (30 percent).

“When we started selling i-term many were skeptical about selling 10 policies per month online. But post April 2010 we are selling around 800-1,000 policies per month,” Srivastava said.

He said the kind of policyholders that the company has from online channel vastly different from what its individual agency force brings in.

“The average sum assured of i-term is around Rs.63 lakh and the average premium per policy is Rs.11,000 where as in the case of an offline term assurance policy it is Rs.15 lakh and Rs.6,000 respectively,” Srivastava added.