Conference Call with ICICI Lombard General Insurance Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 Earnings and Outlook. Listen in to the full transcript.
Highlights
On the call
Bhargav Dasgupta MD CEO
Gopal Balachandran CFO
Sanjeev Mantri and Alok Agarwal, Executive Directors
Management Comments
Comments from the MD
The limits on the contagion in India is leading to significant economic impacts. We have reorganized the business to keep operations going, and are experiencing entire insurance process in digital mode. At the purchase stage they can transact through web, mobile etc. Over 96% of our policies issued are digital form, and online inspection of claims (InstaSpec) allow realtime claim assessment and processing. During the lockdown we used InstaSpec on 100% of our cases. For policy servicing and query resolution we encourage customers to do this digitally. More than 50% of customers calling call centres prefer the digital option when that is given.
Introduced dedicated product COVID-19 protection cover providing 100% of sum insured on first diagnosis of the virus. We have tied up with flipkart, bharatpay etc to offer this service. We have also introduced a teleconsulting feature on our app for customers. We saw a 50% increase in the base usage here since the start of the lockdown.
Our channel partners are an important part of our strength, and we have focused on customer retention for our partners, and we have provided robocalling and CRM tools for our dealer partners, and other tools for sourcing and acquiring customers, with training programs to quickly bring them up to speed during the lockdown.
April-May are when we run the Udaan program for our MSME customers. We have done this digitally this time.
Management is forgoing 50% of bonus and upcoming increments in light of COVID.
Introduced free COVID-19 testing for underprivileged communities
The authority has notified on March 27 2020 that companies will continue to charge prevailing rates for motor third party liability insurance until further orders. This will impact margins and growth.
They also announced further relaxations in payment of premiums and renewals till May 15 2020. Subdued auto sales and temporary shutting of OEMs in auto may also impact future growth in this segment.
The board of directors has not recommended a final dividend for FY2020.
Our solvency ratio is 2.17 times as of March 31st 2020, and continues to be well above the regulatory requirement of 1.5x.
The general insurance industry overall registered a growth of 11.7% in the year over previous year. Excluding crop segment this growth would be 10.7%.
Outlook: it is extremely difficult to guage, since we don't have much of an idea yet of the exact economic damage and impact. Giving a guidance at this stage would be misleading. But will still share current view.
Commercial: We expect the fire portfolio to grow reasonably well. However marine and engineering may see degrowth due to reduced transit of consignments. Policy extensions due to working health issues. Group health penetration should increase. We expect rural segment to see fast turnaround post lockdown. Idle plants and construction projects may recover post lockdown. Demand for pandemic cover should rise - currently not prevalent in India.
Retail: Motor portfolio growth will get impacted. We expect lower impact on agency and POS channels due to higher focus on renewals. We expect subdued growth in retail health indemnity in Q1FY21. We expect health agency to keep growing. We expect muted growth however in Banking/NBFC. Travel segment will be most impacted. MSME may see growth with more digital adoption.