Aditya Birla Health Insurance crossed the ₹5,000-crore gross written premium (GWP) milestone in FY25. Chief executive officer Mayank Bathwal tells Narayanan V about the growth strategy for the current fiscal and the broader trends in India’s health insurance landscape. Excerpts:
What is your GWP growth target for FY26?
We are part of a listed company and we can’t give any forward looking numbers. Just to give an idea, our gross written premium grew 42% year-on-year to ₹5,252 crore in FY25. The industry grew by around 15%. We also had the first full year of profit last year, which is again an achievement – for our scale of business, achieving profit in eight years is rare. We haven’t seen anyone else doing that. We also increased the market share in the standalone health insurance space to 12.6% from 11.2%. We are confident of growing ahead of the market in the future as well and will focus on increasing the profitability.
What is the mix between retail and group health?
Retail health is about 53% of our total business, with corporate health contributing the remaining. In corporate (employer-employee) insurance, we do more SMEs, as we feel that our ability to influence consumers is a lot more there. We are a “health-first insurance company.” Unlike the traditional model where one typically is a sickness funding player, we offer two benefits: A promise of working with customers for good health, and if something happens, paying for the cost of that health event.
Ours is the only product which actually gives 100% of the premium back for good health. We do that by tracking physical health and clinical health of customers. Unlike others in the industry, corporate health is also making money for us because we are very clear on what kind of corporates we want to underwrite. We have gradually brought our health-first approach to corporates as well.
The health insurance segment is facing a slowdown. Your views on growth prospects.
We may have year-to-year issues, but I think companies that are focused on health insurance will see growth. SAHIs (standalone health insurers) are doing better, growing at 20% plus.
Fundamentally, if there’s one category which has all the levers for very high growth in the future and all the tailwinds, it is health insurance. The cost of healthcare will only grow, with better technology coming in and more and more corporatisation happening. So, people will have to find ways to fund that through insurance. Therefore, insurance has structural tailwinds going in its favour.
There are lots of white spaces. For example, the outpatient department (OPD) coverage which includes all expenditure outside of hospital — doctor, medicine, diagnostic — accounts for 55–60% of healthcare cost. As an insurance company, we are the largest corporate OPD provider in the country.
But OPD coverage in retail health hasn’t picked up?
We are yet to find the real answer for retail OPD. Some of us have launched retail OPD, but not exactly in a way where it can be scaled up. Now, consumers are willing to buy more comprehensive products. The other thing that has happened after Covid is that consumers want to buy higher sums. Pre-Covid, a ₹5-lakh sum assured was considered good, but consumers have realised that ₹5 lakh is not enough — they are opting for ₹8 lakh, ₹10 lakh, or even more. So, the ticket size has gone up. Re-basing of medical costs did also happen after Covid. However, all these have been normalised now. I think that more and more people will continue to increase their coverage amounts. We offer up to ₹6-crore cover.