B’luru sees most growth in fire, health insurance

Bengaluru: Insurance companies say Bengaluru is one of the few metros that bucked the trend in April 2020 and saw good growth in categories like fire, marine and health insurance.

New India Assurance Co said it saw 60% growth in the city. “We have a range of clients in the city - corporates, mid-caps and SMEs. In fact, we have an additional office in Peenya Industrial Estate. And it’s not just Bengaluru, but industrial clusters in Mysuru and Mangaluru that have done well,” said a New India official.

New India also said it has seen some growth in health. “This might not necessarily be linked to the pandemic. Year-on-year, health insurance has been growing on average at 8-10% and it followed the same trend this year too,” said the official.

For ICICI Lombard, Bengaluru was the best performing metro. “I’d say it’s the presence of large corporates, particularly the IT sector, that’s contributed. After Bengaluru, the next best cities in terms of sales for us were Mumbai and then Delhi.”

B C Prabhakar, president, Karnataka Employers Association (KEA), said the increase might have been because audit requirements have gone up. “There are a lot of component manufacturers for defence, aerospace (HAL) and ISRO in Bengaluru. Earlier, only they were being audited. Now, their raw material suppliers are also coming in for audit. They may be buying more fire insurance than earlier,” he said.

Brokers in the city said that insurance purchases by SMEs and MSMEs might have also gone up because of higher compliance requirement. The former Karnataka labour secretary Capt P Manivannan, before his recent transfer, had come down hard on industrial units that were not providing health insurance cover.

Another CEO of a private insurer, which has gone into the silent period on account of the upcoming Q1 results, said, “Bengaluru commercial office space had gone up in fiscal 2020; and proportionally, large builders took more fire insurance. But the coming year will be challenging.”

Source: The Times of India