September 28, 2010
ETF offering a good bet
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September 21, 2010
Selecting the right broker?
Stock market is soaring high and breaking records every day. Making huge bucks out of it, is a lucrative prospect. All of my friends are having online demat account with almost all the leading brokerage houses in India. All of them are providing online trading facility along with many other facilities like online investment in IPO, commodities, mutual funds and currency, etc. All of them claim to be the best one and being awarded by some award. Infact top 10 among them are well known and huge groups. ICICI Direct, Reliance Money, Sharekhan, Motilal Oswal, Edelweiss, Geojit Bnpparibas, Kotak Securities, HDFC securities, Angel Broking, Karvy and India Infoline, they all are well famous and renowned firms.
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September 7, 2010
Living a new life for life insurance
Things have changed; wind is blowing in an entire new direction. After a huge disagreement between SEBI and IRDA over the regulation of ULIPs, IRDA came up with new guidelines for ULIPs and these new guidelines have completely change the way business of ULIPs is conducted in the country. Insurance regulatory and development authority of India has redesigned Unit Linked Insurance Product as long term protection plans instead of it earlier position of investment products. It has reduced its cost and changed the commission structure.
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August 3, 2010
Is Honeymoon over?
Come September 1 and you will have different ULIPs and pension plan across life insurance companies. Insurance regulatory and development authority has recently issued new guidelines for Unit Linked Insurance Plans and pension plans. New ULIPs will come with a five year lock in period instead of three years. Commission payout will also be restructured and pension plans will look different than older ones. These all steps have been taken to curb mis selling. IRDA has been asking insurers to take necessary steps but it didn’t result in any significant drop in mis-selling. Generally, sales agents apply different tactics to sell life insurance policy which include telling customer that policy can be redeemed in three years and money will be doubled in that period. There are very few sales agents who sell life insurance as life insurance but most of them introduce life insurance products as some fund or saving plans.
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July 15, 2010
Faceoff between hospitals and Health Insurance companies
Recently many health insurance companies removed the name of many big hospitals from list of the Preferred Provider Network (PPN). They claim that hospitals have been inflating their bills for patients who have mediclaim policies offering cashless facility. Most of these hospitals are from metros like Mumbai and Delhi. Since the news broke, it has caused paic among policy holders and they are running from hospitals to Third party administer (TPA) and from TPA to insurance company. This has led to the chaos among patients who holds these health insurance policies and they are not able to understand the logic behind this move. Due to overstating of bills by major healthcare providers, the industry ended up paying Rs 11,000 crore on the premium collection of Rs 8,000 crore.
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July 2, 2010
Changing the way life insurance operates in India
Insurance regulatory and development authority of India has recently introduced new ULIP guidelines. These guidelines will be affected from 1st of September 2010. In last few months, IRDA has taken several steps to streamline life insurance business and safeguard consumer interests. Mis-selling has been a huge problem troubling life insurance player in India. New guidelines are meant to check mis-selling and put life insurance products as insurance products rather than investment products. Life insurance players have been selling ULIPs as investment products rather life insurance. After this, it will be strenuous for life insurance companies to selling ULIPs as core investment products. New guidelines have increased the lock in period to 5 years, ask insurance companies to control cost and restructure the commission payments to distributers and agents.
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June 30, 2010
New guidelines at place for ULIPs
The Insurance Regulatory and development authority of India had introduced new ULIPs guidelines to protect consumer interest and enhance ULIPs as Insurance products than investment products.
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February 18, 2010
Shop intelligently for Insurance
Sale season is on in India. Discounts always attract customers, getting something in less than its actual price always does the trick. Life insurance should not be the exception but we hardly get any Life insurance sale. With the growing number of life insurers in the market, competition has increased and resulted in more number of options for investors. But cracking a better deal in life insurance is not always the prime factor while doing a purchase.
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February 15, 2010
Risk management in Life insurance
Risk management is one of the most imperative things in financial industry. Recent global credit crisis has happened because of poor risk management practices followed by many global giants. Risk management is a science & an art, as well. It involves looking into the profile of an individual & determines the risk associated with it. Risk management is essential as it measures the paying capacity of a individual & net worth of the person. Risk management is important for all kind of financial institutions irrespective of the kind of products or services they offer.
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February 15, 2010
Unit Linked Insurance Products
Unit Linked Insurance Products or ULIP are the hottest selling insurance products. They contribute around 80 percent of the total new business premium collection of the insurance companies’ collection. Their biggest USP is that they provide insurance cover and investment benefits. These are market linked products where premium amount is investment in money market and other investment instruments based upon the fund allocation given by the investors. The investment amount is use to purchase units and unit is represented by the value that it has achieved known as net asset value. The policy value is derived from the total nav of all units.
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February 15, 2010
Regulating Indian Insurance Industry
Recently IRDA announced caps on the charges a insurance company can charge on its products. Earlier also, IRDA has been taking steps to ensure monitored functioning of insurance companies in India like they have been thinking about altering minimum lock in period of a insurance policy. But is it helping the consumer at ground? By putting a cap on the mortality or other charges, it can definitely provide some relief to the customer but the large issue still remains the same and that is, how a insurance policy is sold in India? Double of investment value in three years and many more other success stories which a insurance agent narrates to the customer while convincing. By increasing the lock in period, IRDA can put a check on this but definitely can’t stop this soon.
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February 15, 2010
Need of IT solution for business of Insurance
Insurance companies in India traditionally tend to have a narrow approach towards IT spending for their companies. They still prefer to follow traditional method of manual processing for most of the processes. Few companies have shifted to automated IT products for certain process, but still the large portion of the companies operation are done by manual methods. Insurance operation involves a large number of different processes which integrates into one central and huge database of policies. Looking at Indian population, one can imagine the number of policies being processed and data managed by each of these companies.
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February 15, 2010
Few facts to Tell
Few facts to Tell
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