The Indian market for life insurance, especially the mid- and lower-income segment, presents a big opportunity for growth, says Shriram Life Insurance MD and CEO Casparus JH Kromhout
Casparus J H Kromhout, Managing Director and CEO, Shriram Life Insurance
| Photo Credit:
BIJOY GHOSH
Despite macroeconomic and regulatory disruptions, the Indian market for life insurance, especially the mid- and lower-income segment, presents a big opportunity for growth, said Shriram Life Insurance MD and CEO Casparus JH Kromhout. Growing business sharply in the last three years — 24 per cent in FY23, 39 per cent in FY24 and 45 per cent in FY25 — the life insurance company anticipates growth to stabilise at around 25-30 per cent for FY26. We are on track to achieve our target CAGR of 27 per cent over FY22-FY30, and are putting in place the building blocks of capacity, innovation and technology, Kromhout added. Speaking about the GST rate cut, he considers it good for customers, but says it will impact margins of the highly competitive insurance industry. We are holding back on repricing and will try to do other mitigations, such as cost reductions, to manage the mismatch in input and output tax, he said. Edited Excerpts:
What are the key growth drivers you see for the business?
The 45 per cent growth in FY25 is phenomenal, but we see it stabilising over time. As for the factors, we are investing in the capacity of sales leadership because life insurance is still something that you have to keep reaching out and have to keep selling. We have also invested in product and business model innovation in technology and analytics. We have 30 machine learning models running in the company across businesses. We are seeing all of it paying off.
How is the persistency ratio, and what are your doing to grow it?
The 13-month persistency is just over 60 per cent. It is something we are continuously working on and we’re targeting 70-75 per cent. We are seeing strong growth towards that because more people are aware of insurance. Our Machine Learning models are also helping. These give us the lapse propensity and the fraud propensity, meaning we can see the probability of a new proposal lapsing or turning into a fraud based on the model. On the sales side, we can also understand propensity to buy. So, to be profitable we rely on humans [trust] in the front-end and sophisticated technology in the back-end.
With regard to the JV partnership, is there scope for more capitalisation?
Across the industry, we’re actually seeing that many foreign JV partners have actually moved out because partners often realise that it’s very tough. You have to have the patience and the resilience to stay in it. But Sanlam as a partner is very committed, and has been actually increasing stake. It’s not just invested in the life insurance business, but also in other businesses of the Group. So, the scope [of further capitalisation] is definitely there. In fact, we’re a company with the lowest capital in the industry at ₹175 crore. On average, the private industry capital is more than ₹1,000 crore.
Which channel is working best for you ?
We’re seeing good growth in agency channel and also good success in the venue business. So, we have a strong venue business, where you invite people to come and you tell them about life insurance. We also have a good direct-to-customer channel and, of course, we get about 40 per cent of our business from the Shriram Group itself. By upselling to our transport finance customers. We are not big on bancassurance channel, but we’ve built up a big strength in that space, and are seeing more interest as the mid- to low-income is not well covered by this channel till date.
What is going to be your strategy to achieve the growth goals?
We want to be the company that takes insurance to all. We focus on low- to mid-income families earning ₹5-15 lakh per annum. Our premium size is now about ₹30,000, whereas for the industry it’s over ₹1 lakh. We call it our purpose to reach out to these families and get more and more of them into the safety net of life insurance.
Published on September 24, 2025