SBI Life eyes launches to grab 2nd spot

SBI Life Insurance Company aims to be number 2 after the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC).

While today, SBI Life ranks second to LIC in terms of covering maximum lives "" having crossed the one-million mark "" Gerard Binet, head of international at Cardif group of companies said, "To be number two after LIC, we will need to sell more investment products. Investment premium should be higher than protection premium but on the profitability front, the two should be balanced."

SBI Life today ranks seventh in terms of premium collection as on October 31, with a premium income of Rs 44.28 crore, against LIC's Rs 5,918.65 crore.

Paul Villemagne, chairman and CEO of Cardif, said it is early days to set any time-frame when the local joint venture becomes number 2.

However, he cited the example of Poland, where it has tied up with the post office which had never sold any financial products.

He said, "once we launched our pension product, we showed the best results in the market."

It is just a question of training and organising the army, he said adding that that India would replicate the model with State Bank of India (SBI) and its associate branches.

It took bancassurance 25 years to gain popularity in France and today it commands 60 per cent share.

Similarly, it took just 10 years in Italy, where bancassurance accounts for 65 per cent of insurance sales, said Binet.

"India is the only joint venture of ours, which has been able to acquire one million customers in such a short period of time," said Villemagne.

He is confident that India will be one of the five top markets in the world, the others being the US, Europe, China and Japan.

The $10.5 billion Cardiff SA is bullish on India, as Villemagne highlighted SBI having the largest branch network worldwide, and 22 per cent of India's population being aware of the concept of insurance.

"It will take time for bancassurance to develop in India as we are dealing with a large institution. If our partner were a small bank, then it would have been faster, but SBI is a huge bank," said Binet.