Cigna TTK Health Insurance, the latest entrant into the Indian health insurance space, aims to acquire customers from all spheres of life, says Sandeep Patel, managing director & chief executive officer. In an interview with Vishwanath Nair, he talks about expansion plans and the company?s strategy on distribution. Excerpts:
What kind of customers will you target to grow your business in India?
Generally, when you look at the type of products wehave, we touch all segments of customers. So, I would say from the bottom to the high networth individual (HNI) customers is something we would like to look at.
Obviously, the segments that we target will be driven a lot by the partners that we have. Cigna has a huge amount of experience in working with partners in the financial services or other life institutional distribution partners.
What kind of distribution network are you looking at in India?
Distribution is something that we are looking at from a multi-channel viewpoint. It aligns with our global strategy. Agents are an important part of the way people buy insurance today in India.
We do have six branches in place today; we will launch another five in the next few months. Those branches will act in accordance with other channels. Also, partnerships is how we do business in most parts of the world. Working with financial services companies, other types of partners where there is affinity between the customers and the brand and bringing our product offering there, will be the key manner in which we will be doing our business here.
Underneath the partnership umbrella, there can be different ways that we interact with the customer. One is, obviously, working through the branches of the partners, second would be utilising the tele-calling services and, finally, online is another avenue that we will using to engage with the customer.
So, your partners will largely be banks then?
Banks sound like the most logical partners to have for an insurer. But there are other businesses where there is a clear affinity with the customers, like non-banking finance companies. We have also worked with some telecommunication companies in other markets to distribute our products.
Health insurers in India haven?t really got the bank channel right. What will you do differently?
The way we intend to crack it is by leveraging the expertise that we have. We have done this in other markets. If you were to look at Cigna?s expertise in how we have managed to do this across the Asian markets, it is primarily through banking partners and other financial services companies. We are really doing a tremendous amount of analytics and customer segmentation work to make sure that you are positioning the right product to the right customer. We are actually well known for our analytics.
How do you view competition in India?
I think there are all formidable competitors in my viewpoint. There are different ways of looking at health insurance and the market. We have our own way of looking at it based on our global experience. When you look at 5% penetration of health insurance, over 70% out of pocket spend and medical inflation in India, there is enough room for all of us to exist.