We saw in in insurance++ in theJanuary 2011 issue of Premium, the power of compound interest and the ingenuity of the inventor of the chess game. He asked for one grain of wheat per square of the chess board, two for the second square and so on,a gift the king realised was impossible over several lifetimes! Let us take an example that you could be seeing every day of your life in this, the February 2011 issue.

The Direct Taxes Code Bill, 2010 reduces the tax breaks on Life insurance premium and encourages other forms of investment that are not as safe and critical to the common man says Mr K S Sashi Kumar, Development Officer, Life Insurance Corporation of India, Royapettah Branch, Chennai.

A festival is celebrated to mark an occasion like Narakasura’s destruction at the hands of Lord Krishna. Or, to mark the change of a season, like Makar Sankranti or New Year. Change is celebrated. Even destruction is celebrated since it gives way to creation in its place!
Insurance agents in India are familiar with change. They have been watching the old systems disintegrating and being replaced with new systems.

The new business premium income of the Life insurance industry in financial year 2005-06 was roughly Rs 36,000 crore. That is, First Year Premium grew by 262 per cent to Rs 1,09,290 crore in 2009-10.

September 1, 2010 was the deadline for Life insurance companies to ensure that their Unit-Linked insurance policies (ULIPs) are compliant with the new norms announced by the regulator, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA).
The new policy structure includes limitation on margin, a five year lock in period, Life cover of at least seven to 10 times the value of the First Year Premium on the policy, a 4.5 per cent guaranteed return in the case of a Pension policy, lower discontinuance charges, among others. Over 60 new ULIPs have been cleared by IRDA and slowly companies are launching them.

Spending a long weekend at breathtaking Kovalam beach in Tiruvananthapuram in the beautiful Hotel Leela, about 500 insurance agents were thinking of…… how to master the changes in their profession and stay successful!
That’s what happened at Life Underwriters Guild of India’s (LUGI) 8th Annual Convention at Tiruvananthapuram in the last week of September.

The view that marketing or selling is misrepresentation is a widespread one. It is a burden that the profession has to bear and its members have to overcome before they meet with success.
However, the customer has rights. The law has to guarantee and protect them. And the Government has to help uphold them.
In fact, only if this entire system works to the satisfaction of the customer will it be sustainable. And only then can the seller, sell, says K Nitya Kalyani in this instalment of the Sales Skills series.

Stricter norms for Unit-Linked insurance policies (ULIPs) started this September 1, 2010. In the last few months, ULIPs have been in the news constantly due to the SEBI-IRDA fight over who should regulate it and also due to accusations of widespread mis-selling. Four years ago around this time too it was very much in the [...]

Mr S B Mathur, Secretary General of Life Insurance Council, a statutory body and an association of all the Life insurance companies in India, speaks of the reservations in the industry that the ULIP jurisdiction issue is only shadow boxing for achieving the ‘no entry load’ demand. Talking to K Nitya Kalyani of Premium, Mr Mathur, retired Chairman of LIC, explains how there are many misconceptions about Life insurance selling and its basis in the industry today on which the arguments about abolition of commission or the jurisdiction of ULIPs are being based.

He was in the armed forces, took up insurance agency without a clue about insurance and is riding high. Wing Commander Dinesh Kumar Bhardwaj based at Gurgaon represents the two Tata AIG insurance companies, flying the world as a high achiever in the new career he discovered in his late fifties and trying to din the importance of insurance protection into the heads of his erstwhile defence forces colleagues!