Out of the 23 private insurance companies, only five have crossed 90% mark in claim settlement ratio of individual policies.
Claim settlement ratio of life insurance companies stood at 96% in FY 2012-13 on death claims of both individual and group policies. Claim settlement ratio is the number of claimed settled to the total number of claims registered in a financial year.
In its annual report, IRDA stated that life insurance companies had settled a total of 8.5 lakh claims on individual policies, with a total payout of Rs 9,370 crore during FY 2012-13. However, the companies had rejected 18,485 policies amounting to Rs 568 crore. The number of outstanding complaints were 12,267 and the amount involved was Rs 318 crore.
On group policies, IRDA data showed that the total claims received this year were 3.5 lakh along with 13,640 pending claims of previous year. The insurers had settled close to 3.49 lakh claims in FY 2012-13.
Claim Settlement Ratio of some life insurance companies
|
Insurance Companies |
Claim Settlement Ratio of Individual Policies |
Claim Settlement of group policies |
|
ICICI Prudential |
96.30% |
98.40% |
|
HDFC Standard Life |
95.70% |
99.40% |
|
Bajaj Allianz |
88.70% |
97.80% |
|
SBI Life |
94.40% |
97.30% |
|
Reliance Life |
86.45% |
99.80% |
|
Birla Sun Life |
82.50% |
99.50% |
|
Max Life |
94.30% |
99.10% |
|
Private Total |
88.65% |
87.79% |
|
LIC (Public Total) |
97.70% |
99.54% |
|
Industry Total |
96.40% |
95.69% |
Source: IRDA
The claim settlement ratio of LIC has been better than the private life insurers. As the above table shows, LIC’s claim settlement ratio was much higher at 97.7% and 99.7% respectively in individual and group policies as compared to 88.6% and 87.8% in case of private insurers in FY 2012-13. Private insurers had posted claim settlement ratio of 89.3% in FY 2011-12.
Out of the 23 private insurance companies, only five had crossed 90% mark in claim settlement ratio of individual policies. However, in group category, most of the private companies had fared better. Among these players, ICICI Prudential topped the chart with settlement ratio of 96.3% and 98.4% in individual group and group policies respectively followed by HDFC Standard Life which stood at second position with claim settlement ratios of 95.8% (individual) and 99.8% (group).
Further, the report said that private insurance firms had rejected close to 8% claims in FY 2012-13. LIC had repudiated only 1.12% in FY 2012-13. The data also shows that private insurers had 3.5% of claims pending in FY 2012-13 against 1.04% of LIC.
However, in terms of duration of claim settlement, private insurance companies had outpaced LIC with 83% of individual policies settled in less than 3 month period compared to only 40% of public sector giant. Similarly, in group policies, private insurers had settled 86% of claims within 3 months compared to 25% of LIC in FY 2012-13.