Coronavirus pandemic | Not topline, but customer service, employees top priority right now: IDBI Federal Life CEO

While IDBI Federal Life has seen a decline in new premium collections, CEO Vighnesh Shahane said that it is not merely topline but customer centricity, keeping employees safe, ensuring claims settlements on time, persistency and having less complaints is what their focus would be,

M Saraswathy

March 27, 2020 / 02:02 PM IST

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While the coronavirus outbreak has led to a lockdown across the country leading to business disruptions, IDBI Federal Life Insurance’s key focus right now in ensuring critical activities like claims settlement, persistency (through renewals), investment operations and policy servicing are taken care of.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Vighnesh Shahane, MD & CEO - IDBI Federal Life Insurance, has said that - while their top-line has been seeing a decline - their focus right now is employee well-being and customer servicing.

“While the fourth quarter is important, the COVID-19 problem that has descended is far greater than JFM (January-February-March) period business. The entire world is talking about survival hence everything else is put into the backseat. But we also want to ensure that if a customer reports a claim, IDBI Federal Life should settle it quickly,” he said.

IDBI Federal Life saw a 29.5 percent year-on-year (YoY) drop in the first year premium collection to Rs 489.54 crore in the April 1, 2019 to February 29, 2020 period compared to the year-ago period. The insurer has faced challenges in topline growth ever since there was an ownership change in one parent bank.

Its profits however, have remained stable. For the nine months ended December 31, IDBI Federal profit after tax was up 54 percent YoY to Rs 29.14 crore.

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