Life insurers posted a 14% year-on-year growth in new business premiums to ₹35,020.28 crore in September, primarily driven by a surge in individual non-single premium collections.
Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) saw its new business premiums rise by 12% to ₹20,369.26 crore last month. Group single premiums made up the bulk of LIC’s total premium at ₹12,786.61 crore, followed by individual non-single premiums (₹3,862.02 crore) and individual single premiums (₹3,233.44 crore).
For the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, LIC’s new business premium grew 25% to ₹1.15 trillion, compared with ₹92,642.62 crore in the same period last year.
It remains to be seen if LIC can sustain this growth in coming quarters, as it recently reduced the first-year agent commission from 35% to 28%.
LIC’s decision follows a directive from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), which raised the surrender value of life insurance products to provide better payouts for customers exiting their policies prematurely. The new surrender value rules took effect on October 1.
Private life insurers, which include 26 companies, recorded a 16% year-on-year rise in new business premiums, totalling ₹14,651.02 crore in September. Over the April-September period, private life insurers saw their new business premium grow by 12% to ₹73,664 crore.
In the private sector, SBI Life Insurance led with ₹2,991.77 crore in new business premiums in September, followed by HDFC Life Insurance (₹2,670.46 crore) and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance (₹1,659.9 crore).
Driven by a strong demand for enhanced insurance protection from individual consumers, new policy issuances increased 45.49% on a year-on-year basis in September, resulting in the addition of 32,17,880 new policies vis-à-vis 22,11,680 policies in the year-ago period, according to the monthly data released by the Life Insurance Council.