LIC has near 100% claim settlement record

LIC has near 100% claim settlement record 

LIC had an unmatched 99.47 % claim settlement record for the last year 

UPAMANYU SHAN BAUG
According to D K Mehrotra, chairman, Life Insurance Corporation of India, for the year ended March 31 2012, the company settled a total of 185.70 lakh claims with an amount of 65,586 crores under individual category alone. 

"93.19% of the maturity claims are settled on or be-fore maturity date. 93.94 010 of non-early death claims are settled within 15 days of intimation," he says. 

Mehrotra added that this year, so far the company has settled 152.16 lakh number of claims and an amount to the tune of z 49349.61 crores.

 LIC's death claim repudi-ation ratio is also very low at 1.3 0/0, lowest among all the insurers in India. Incidentally, industry's repudiation ratio is 2.24%.

 Mehrotra states that their endeavor has been to connect to the customer and not just sell products. "Our motto has been 'Compete with your own'. We take pride in being the true deliverers of promises," he says.

 He explains that the company makes it a point to settle survival benefit and maturity claims well in advance.

 "Payment of Maturity claims 'on or before due
date' is our core strategy. We identify claims falling due, right at the beginning of the year. We have set a benchmark of one month for settlement of Non-early Death Claims," he explains. 

Mehrotra explains that since the last seven years they have initiated the idea of digitization of their policy holders' data. "Nearly 800/0 of the data is digitized. So unlike earlier where one had to go physically to the office to get one's policy done, now it can be done from any center. This would ensure faster processing of policy services," he says. 

He also added that in order to facilitate the customers to pay their premium conveniently, the < company has come out 0 with a number of options. "Today, in addition to the facility of paying premium in any branch in the country, we have authorized our more than 28,000 agents, development officers and the retired employees to collect the premium of any customer at his office," he adds. These options are be-coming popular as till February 2013, almost 35% of customers preferred these channels. "We collected 34,037 crore from 11.01 crore transactions up to end of February this year," he says.