HDFC Ergo General Insurance Company has gone through two avatars in ten years of its existence. Promoted by the Indian housing loan company Housing Development Finance Company (HDFC) and the US insurance group Chubb Corporation, the company saw the exit of its US parent after a few years. After a period as HDFC General Insurance, the company acquired a new foreign shareholder in Ergo, a direct insurance company of one of the top reinsurance groups of the world, Munich Re.
In this interview with Premium’s K Nitya Kalyani,
Mr Ritesh Kumar, Managing Director of HDFC Ergo General Insurance Company talks about the challenges and trends in Motor and Health insurance, both of which represent the great hopes of the General insurance industry’s future in India.

Jim Ruta in this special column, tells you about the keys to understanding and mastering the art of high performance. Lap them up…

With competition becoming a fact of life in the industry, insurance companies began to wake up to the urgent need to have a strong agency force on the ground. And they knew agents would be easier on their pockets, says K Nitya Kalyani in this latest instalment of her series.

Insurance liberalisation was aimed at creating competition for the benefit of the customer. Part of the reforms process in the industry was the creation of multiple sales channels so that the customer has choice not only of insurers but also of the mode by which he buys insurance.
In this new Cover Story series, Inside Insurance, started three months ago, we will see how each channel has developed in the first decade of the new-look insurance industry. This month we take a look at the business performance of each channel in the financial year 2009-10 and earlier.
K. Nitya Kalyani discovers how different sales channels have grown in tandem and how the market has grown from a single-channel, agent-oriented market to a multi-channel market where the pie has grown bigger for all.