India-based financial services firm Centrum announced has announced it has obtained a direct insurance brokers license from Indian regulators.
Centrum insurance head Anirudh Jain said on Friday the company has been growing at a 27% compounded annual growth rate, with “significant opportunity” to scale up the firm’s operations.
"We are targeting to generate a revenue of Rs 500 crore [approx. USD$78 million] through insurance premiums over the next five years, by leveraging synergies across the group's other business of wealth management, housing finance and forex. We expect to sell [100,000] policies by end of 2017-18," he said.
Centrum Group entered the insurance market in April last year as a composite corporate agent. It is currently one of the few companies in India to offer services to clients across the three segments: corporate, HNI [high net-worth individual], and retail.
In its first year of business, the insurance arm sold over 10,000 policies. “We have aspiration to emerge as a standalone insurance company, once we build scale in our insurance business,” said Jain, as quoted by
The Economic Times.
Centrum will make headway in an industry that is ripe for overhaul, as a report compiled by former members of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has called for the industry to boost performance.
The report, prepared jointly by former IRDAI [Insurance Regulatory & Development Authority of India] member H Ansari and insurance expert Arun Agarwal, said that compliance costs are high as regulatory policy is less development orientated,
The Economic Times reported.
“The regulatory framework and support system tends to over-regulate,” the report said. “Predictably the cost of compliance is high and regulatory policy is less development oriented.”
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