In a first of its kind initiative, India’s Telenor, MicroEnsure and Shriram Life are launching an embedded insurance product distribution scheme by offering free life insurance to its existing 47.55 million customer base as well as new mobile subscribers of Telenor India across its six operating circles. This insurance product named “Suraksha” gives protection which will be 100 times the value of recharge and up to maximum cover of Rs 50,000 per connection for a month.
Richard Leftley, CEO of MicroEnsure encapsulated this initiative: “Embedded insurance products cast a wider financial net, wide enough to catch the poor of India, but without the limitations of traditional marketing and sales processes. With this venture we look forward to creating a powerful driver of core business for our partners whilst mitigating risk for millions of consumers in India. With this initiative we hope to set new benchmarks.”
MicroEnsure helps in designing these mass-market insurance products and in providing on-going operational support required to make a digital product work.
Currently, only 3.9% of India’s population has an insurance cover of any type. The primary reasons for the low penetration are issues like lack of awareness, cumbersome enrolment process, costly premiums and lack of trust. Lack of distribution networks has also kept the insurance penetration rate low.
CEO of Telenor India, Vivek Sood describes the partnership as “bridging the disparity in access to life insurance among the low and middle-income individuals. With insurance penetration being very low in the country, our scheme has the potential to empower society through financial security. Our deep understanding of mass-market consumer behavior, a huge retail network and efforts to create awareness around services beyond basic voice will enable us to remove persistent financial risks faced by our customers. With the life insurance offer, Telenor will create a unique differentiation in financial services just like we have done with our affordable mobile service”.
To date, over 17 million Indians have enrolled themselves under this scheme, whilst almost 7.8 million customers have been insured across Telenor’s network until January 2016. Telenor claims that it has the highest number of policy holders in the country for a single micro insurance product.
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