ING Vysya Life enters retirement segment

Bangalore-based ING Vysya Life Insurance on Tuesday forayed into the retirement segment by unveiling its new product 'ING Goldenlife', a unit-linked pension plan that enables customers to build a retirement fund.

ING Vysya Life has a customer base of 565,000 and it aims to have 1.2 million by the end of 2008, and is hoping that the policy will account for a good share of the growth.

The plan has been conceived on the general understanding that the post-retirement period is no longer a brief event and that an individual needs to plan for two decades after retiring at the age of 60.

Speaking to reporters here, Kshitij Jain, managing director of ING Vysya Life Insurance, said the target segment of the plan were customers in the age bracket of 25 years to 45 years who are looking at building a corpus for their golden years.

The distinct features of the plan include loyalty units additions, large volume discounts, life stage investment programme (LSIP) and no medical underwriting. Under loyalty units, customers will be able to grow their retirement funds faster as units are added as a percentage of the fund value at the end of each policy year.

For instance, if a customer saves Rs 5 lakh as premium payment for five years and stays vested for a period of 30 years, he will be rewarded loyalty units based on the fund size at 0.2 per cent and 0.3 per cent of the fund value each year as long as his premiums are paid, Jain said.

LSIP allows customers to manage the retirement fund according to their risk profile. Customers have a choice between standard investment programme whereby upto 60 per cent of the fund is invested in equity or an aggressive programme whereby all of it 100 per cent is invested in equity.

While equity exposure decreases by 3 per cent every year till the vesting age under the standard programme, it decreases by 5 per cent under the aggressive programme, Jain added.