MetLife to double consultants

MetLife Insurance will be doubling the number of financial planning consultants it has from 11,480 people to around 20,000 during the next calender year between January and December, 2007.

The company is increasing its agent base with the intention of capturing a large share of the market.

MetLife's market share is negligible at present.

"The idea is to grow into a bigger player in the market by expanding the distribution system. We want to increase our market share and the way we have decided to do this is by strengthening our multi distribution system which consists of agency sales, third party sales and institutional sales," Rajesh Relan, MD, Metlife India Insurance Compamy said.

Apart from hiring more financial planning consultants, the company had recently entered into a bancassurance tie-up with the UTI Bank. This is MetLife's fourth bancassurance tie-up after J&K Bank, Karnataka Bank and Dhanalaxmi Bank.

The tie-up will give MetLife a national footprint as UTI Bank is currently the third largest private bank in India. Also, the tie up is a referral model under which MetLife would be deploying its own staff in the bank's branches and the staff would work on the leads generated by UTI Bank.

This is the first time MetLife has adopted this model.

The company has gone in for this model since it is easily scalable.. "It takes time for a corporate agency to train staff and deploying our own staff at the bank ensures quick scalability since the bank does not have to spend time in training new staff. The training would be done by us," Relan said.

In the first phase, the company would deploy 250 people in 158 branches in 13 cities and in the second phase till April 2007, around 454 financial planning consultants would be deployed.

In the institutional business which is providing insurance policies to corporates, MetLife has about 10 per cent market share. It has tie-ups with 350 corporates.and the company has covered 8 lakh lives in this segment.

MetLife is also looking at raising capital from its exisitng investors. The capital base of the company is currently Rs 355 crore. J&K bank holds 25 per cent of the equity, M Pallonji holds 20 per cent, 26 per cent is held by MetLife while the rest is with other investors.

"We are building our plans. We will raising capital but we have not finalised details," Relan said.