Prospects and Issues of Online Insurance in India
Authors: Dr. Sudhansu Sekhar Nayak, Anita Kumari Patro, Kusa Panigrahi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZDTXM
Short DOI: https://doi.org/ggkv9d
Country: INDIA
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Abstract:
Now Internet is being used to compare prices on everything from travel to hospitality to education to loans, and more so, insurance products. With the help of Internet, the industry has been able to tide over the constraint of 'human' contact. Not only that, consumer is also purchasing different policies online in the wake of increased transparency, ease and advantage of saving money. While the life insurance industry got affected by the introduction of cap in charges, the general insurance industry got impacted by price detariffication and Motor third party risk pooling arrangement. Online policy purchase in India, while currently small (2% of overall offline sales) has grown at the rate of 200% in the last 2 years. The rate of growth is expected to continue to be in triple digit figures in the near future. As per market estimates, almost 13 million searches a month are related to insurance, retirement and pension. With the third largest base of internet users in the world and growing high-value and demanding consumer segment, many companies are coming up with customized offerings to tap the increasing appetite of customers looking for options. Owing to issues like lack of transparency of information, lack of standardization, arrangement of key terms, most of the online insurers were unable to make an impact. Online insurance today is merely an inward looking transactional process. It's about collecting data of prospects, setting up backend to handle that & scaling up with the hope of a higher business gains. Sale of the product to the user is not based on best fit but on who pays the most.
Insurers that better understand the buying behavior of online customers, develop innovative, attractive and simple products catering to specific customer needs and, most importantly, have a robust communication and customer engagement model backing their online marketing strategy will emerge as future market leaders in online insurance distribution in India the growing internet segment and consumer. Digital insurance in India is set to become massive, supported by developments like mobility to drive Internet growth, move over natives, the migrants are in full force and move over metres, the report said. Today, the overall influence of internet on insurance product purchase in India is already 6x and growing rapidly. Insurance companies in India are still lagging behind the consumers and have not invested enough to create digital assets to engage the mature consumers online. The biggest challenge for the industry would be to think big.
Keywords: Online policy purchase, Transactional Process, IRDA, Internet Users, penetration.
Paper Id: 329
Published On: 2015-03-01
Published In: Volume 3, Issue 2, March-April 2015