Health insurance sales see double digit rise post Covid in Karnataka

Bengaluru: The pandemic has made consumers in Karnataka financially more prudent prompting them to invest more in protection products like term & health insurance. Policy bazaar has observed double-digit increase in the number of term and health insurance policies being bought during the Covid pandemic compared to 2019.

The sale of term insurance policies specific to Karnataka region went up by 54% in April and by 32% for April-September. In terms of health insurance, the State witnessed a growth by 92% year-over-year (YoY) and 25% on an average from April-September.

A spike in buying behaviour has been clearly pronounced for term life insurance, considering the industry's simplest and most affordable product. The term market has undergone a lot of changes in the first half of FY-20. In terms of customer buying proportion on an overall level Karnataka witnessed a growth by 21% compared to 2019. Nearly 64% of the customers bought term policies with cover of Rs 1 crore and above during April-September 2020. This reflects how people are well invested in higher cover policies that are available at affordable prices. For a 30-year-old individual buying term insurance with Rs. 1 crore sum assured and for a cover up to 70 years, the premium comes around merely Rs. 1,000 per month.

COVID has increased insurance awareness and consumers are keen to protect their families in the unpredictable times.

As per data, the age group of 42-50 years witnessed highest increase in term insurance buying YoY, i.e. by 95% and for the year 2020 the age group 31-40 years holds the largest share in terms of policies bought, i.e., 54%. Currently 67% of Policybazaar's traffic belongs to salaried segment and 33% is self-employed. The share of High Net Individuals buying policies online with Policybazaar is around 20%.

Santosh Agarwal, CBO-Life Insurance, Policybazaar.com, said "We have introduced various kinds of income surrogates, such as credit card limits, monthly SIP for mutual funds, bank statement for saving account in individual name and property loan statement, to ease out the process of arranging income documents which replicates their true capacity to take adequate sum assured. We have also tied up with bureaus like CIBIL, CRIF, and Experian Verifying the profiles & documents."

Around 43% people bought health plans with cover of Rs 1 crore and 59% people bought a family floater health plan with a cover of Rs 1 crore and 41% people bought individual health plans. The age group of 26-45 years invested maximum in health insurance, followed by the age segment 46-60, i.e. 20%.

Amit Chhabra, Health Insurance, Head, Policybazaar.com, said, "A sudden medical emergency at any point in time poses a huge threat to one's accumulated corpus if he/she doesn't have an adequate health cover. Keeping this in mind, buying a health insurance at right age is not only affordable but also makes sure that you stay financially secured against any medical emergency. With medical inflation rising at double-digit pace, consumers from Karnataka are now looking for health insurance plans with higher sum insured."