Individual agents are the largest sales channel for health insurers with 35% share in the total premium collection in FY 2020-2021, shows IRDAI's latest report. In the case of general insurers, their share in total premium stood at 24%.
The dominance of individual agents is even higher in the health insurance space if we look at only the retail business. "Individual agents contributed a major share in total health insurance premium at 35 per cent. The share of this channel was high at 74 per cent in individual health insurance premium," the report states.
Apart from individual agents, direct channels (mostly offline), brokers and corporate banks are the biggest sources of business for health insurers. In FY 2020-2021, life insurers collected 28% of the premium through direct channels (26.5% through offline and 1.7% through online). Brokers emerged as the third largest source of business with 24% share.
In the case of general insurers, brokers are the largest players with 30% contribution in premium collected in FY 2021. Direct channels are the next biggest contributors with 26% share followed by individual agents, who together bring 24% of the total business for FY 2021.
Public sector general insurers derive much higher amount of business from individual agents compared to their private peers. The report shows that individual agents' contribution in total premium collection of public general insurers was 41% as against 16% in the case of private companies.
