Digital Surge at Chola MS

The Company Plans to Deepen Its Presence in Tier 2, 3 & 4 Markets:

Chola MS General Insurance Company, a joint venture between India’s Murugappa Group and Japan’s Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, offers a wide range of insurance products that include motor, health, property, accident, engineering, liability, marine, travel and crop insurance for individuals and corporates. The company has registered a growth in gross written premium (including reinsurance remittance) of 7.90% at Rs4.43 billion. If the conscious scaling down of exposures in crop insurance segment by the company is excluded, the real growth works out to around 11% for the FY 2018-19. Real growth here means excluding crop insurance, while including motor, health, accidents and travel insurance (HAT). Motor insurance growth is 14% and HAT is 18%.

S.S. Gopalarathnam, MD of the company, explains that growth in business operations at the company continued to be driven by strong performance in retail channel, with motor and health insurance contributing over 75% of the premiums, with a good mix across metros & non metros. The company services around 8.9 million customers pan India.

XPRESS OUTLETS

At present, the company has 87 branches and over 34,000 agents across the country. It also has 490 outlets for servicing customers. Through this network, it is offering various services and uses several digital initiatives to enhance customer experience. One such initiative is Chola Insurance Xpress outlets, which have been well received by the customers. A new digital retail format is applied to tier 3 & 4 geographies, where the focus is on ttechnology-driven low cost expansion, which the company believes is the future growth engine of India. It has also come up with Transactions and Service Kiosks, a first in India, to facilitate instant policy issuance.