IndiaFirst Life Insurance back in black; posts Rs 30 crore profit for FY21

New Delhi: IndiaFirst Life Insurance Company Ltd returned to profit with Rs 30 crore in the kitty in 2020-21 without compromising on its solvency or the need to additional capital, its MD & CEO R M Vishakha said.

“We posted Rs 30 crore annual profit after tax in 2020-21 after a loss of Rs 96 crore in the preceding year. In 2019-20, there was a blip because of the IL&FS provisioning. We were already profitable for the past five years. “It is commendable that despite a pandemic year, we made it back (to profit) without any additional increase of capital, without any adverse impact on solvency. We managed our liquidity and our business and we became profitable (again),” Vishakha told PTI.

The private sector insurer, promoted by Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India and Warburg Pincus, paid Rs 388 crore in overall claims during the year, up by nearly 35% from a year ago’s Rs 253 crore, she said.

“We paid Rs 45 crore for COVID-19 claims across group and individual policies. Despite rise in claims due to COVID-19 claims, we made profits in 2020-21,” Vishakha said.

She said 2020-21 has been really good for IndiaFirst Life Insurance in terms of achieving an entire holistic growth.
“We showed a 300 basis point increase in our 13 month persistency, so the persistency numbers went up,” she said.

In terms of insurers’ business, she said there is a basic difference between last year and the current year.

“I think what happened last year was we lost the last week of March. So, the year-end did not close well and it wasn’t normal closing of business. Whereas this year, the advantage is that we had the normal closing of business and the severity of the virus started only on April 15,” Vishakha said.

She added that the April-June quarter normally has about 13-14% business. “Last year, we did about 8% of the business. So, we hope to be doing approximately 9-10% of the business in Q1. So, we should be able to do well on that (front).” IndiaFirst Life launched a lot of products filed and were approved by Irdai.

“And, we could roll out these products that helped us out to ensure that we give our customers the policy they need.

“Then from our marketing perspective, we had a lot of campaigns, we even sponsored a movie (short commercial) that got a tremendous amount of visibility through the marketing initiatives,” said the official.

On asked about increase in premium, she said the company has not increased premium in its savings products or regular term products.

“The premium has been increased only in the e-term products because of the changes in the premium rates by the reinsurers.

“So, we had to change the premium but only in online term products on account of re-insurance premium. In all our other products, we did not change the premium,” she added further.