Bharti AXA General Insurance crosses 100,000 claims

Addressing some of the biggest apprehensions Indian customers share with regard to insurance related matters, Bharti AXA General Insurance has consistently focused on improving service delivery mechanisms as a key differentiator to enrich customer experience. As a part of that, the company has paid over 100,000 claims since inception.

North and West together contribute to about 75% of the claims by number, with the bulk of the rest coming from the South. As with other multi-line players, the Motor & Health products contribute to 97% of the claims. In keeping with its strong commitment to taking insurance to every Indian, the Company operates a 24X7 call centre for claims notification and manages claims through a decentralized organization with empowered personnel & processes in order to ensure prompt decision making at every level. This enables a customer to claim anywhere irrespective of the branch from where he purchased insurance. In addition to tying up with an extensive network of over 3500 hospitals and 2000+ car garages for cashless settlement of claims, the Company is focusing on streamlining its internal processes through the use of process improvement initiatives such as Six Sigma in order to benefit the end Customer. Click to apply Health Insurance

The company firmly believes that Information Technology has a huge role to play in delivering superior claims service and is investing more in the development of a customer & partner centric IT platform to achieve this objective. Additionally, the Company continues to leverage AXA's global expertise to invest in developing the technical and soft skills of its claims staff with a view to resolving claims in a Fast, Friendly & Fair manner. Keeping the customer at the center Bharti AXA has already paid over 93% of the claims that have been reported while some are under process. As a result of focus on customer centricity the number of all complaints recorded as a percentage of the customer base has been significantly below 1%.

"We are extremely excited to reach this landmark in our history and the credit goes to our employees and partners who work tirelessly & passionately to help our customers when they need empathetic support in an adverse situation. We rely strongly on customer advocacy and view each customer as a long-term client. What especially differentiates us is our ability to provide claims consultancy at the very beginning of the client relationship rather than at the occurrence of the loss. With every achievement our responsibility and accountability to our customers & society at large also increases. We are working with added vigour to become the Preferred General Insurance Organization in India by focusing on our core attitudes of being Available, Attentive & Reliable." said Rajagopal Gopalan, Head, Operations and Claims, Bharti AXA General Insurance.

"While we are growing as a company and have crossed 550cr of GWP for the year 2010-11 and plan to grow at over 60% this year we continue to focus on Re-defining general insurance in India by delivering superior customer & partner experience." said Dr. Amarnath Ananthanarayanan, CEO & Managing Director, Bharti AXA General Insurance

BPL insurance plan hit by payment delays

The government’s flagship health insurance scheme for below poverty line (BPL) people, Rash­triya Swasthya Bima Yojana, is in trouble as about Rs 250 crore premiums due to insurers is pending with state governments. In turn, claims worth Rs 96 crore made by hospitals have to be settled by insurers as of April 15, 2011. RSBY is subsidised by state and central governments in the ratio 25:75.

Insurers and their third party administrators have complained to the centre about delay in premium receipts. The centre, in turn, has pointed to the longer time taken by them to settle claims.

The government has held discussions with chai­rmen and managing directors of insurance companies and TPAs in Raipur during May 2-5 to resolve outstanding issues. Labour ministry has also begun one-to-one meetings with chiefs of insurance companies and TPAs beginning last Friday, said Anil Swar­up, joint secretary in labour and employment ministry.

“Delay in payments to insurers is a problem. It happens as the payment has to be made in advance and also since RSBY has expanded very fast. The bu­dgetary requirements have increased and processes take time. However, in so­me cases, 100 per cent premium has been received by insurance companies yet the claims are not settled to hospitals,” Swarup said.

“We have raised the issue at national and state-level workshops emphasising the need for state governments to expedite payment to insurance companies. There has been quite a lot of improvement in states like Punjab, Kerala and West Bengal that have set up mechanisms thr­ough which money is housed with a state nodal agency and is paid to the insurer,” said Swarup.

“The central government has just recently cleared all pending bills of insurance companies. It is now only the dues from the state governments that are pending,” added Swarup.

G Srinivasan, chairman and managing director of government-owned United India Insurance, said, “Rs 50 crore to Rs 60 crore is outstanding with the governments in the last four to eight months. We are talking to the governments to get timely payment and are not contemplating withdrawing from the scheme.”

A senior official of Oriental Insurance said, “The premium booked by us last year was Rs 150 crore of which Rs 40 crore is still outstanding.”

ICICI Lombard has to receive Rs 27 crore premiums from the central government while Cholamandalam MS General has Rs 50 crore pending.

Alok Agarwal, executive director at ICICI Lombard, said, “We are talking to RSBY coordinators in expediting the payment. We are not considering withdrawal from the scheme.”

Even though RSBY requires that insurance companies settle claims in 21 days, government-owned insurers have not been able to settle even 50 per cent of the claims in the past three years.

Data with Financial Chronicle show that four government-owned insurers — New India Assurance, Oriental Insurance, National Insurance and United India Insurance — have yet to settle more than 50 per cent of the claims on April 15, 2011. Among private insurance companies, ICICI Lombard has 35.31 per cent claims pending while Tata-AIG General has 28 per cent. However, companies like Star Health and Allied Insurance, Apollo Munich and Iffco-Tokio have no pending claims.

“The inertia in government companies is more. Private players, on the contrary, are more innovative and have evolved systems for faster claims settlement,” said Swarup.

State insurers and private insurers have a market share of 50 per cent each in RSBY. Overall, the scheme has been profitable for insurance companies. There are 11 insurance companies that have insured RSBY beneficiaries.

Budget allocation for RSBY in 2011-12 was Rs 279.94 crore. This is significantly lower than the actual spending of Rs 445.89 crore in 2010-11. The fall comes despite extending the coverage of the scheme to include unorganized workers in hazardous mining and associated industries.

RSBY was formally launched on October 1, 2007 and became operational on April 1, 2008. So far, more than 2.34 crore smart cards have been issued and nine crore people have been covered. The scheme is running in 25 states. It provides a cover for hospitalization charges of Rs 30,000 for a family of five.

Indian IT cos slow to tap into the healthcare vertical

Indian IT majors have been slow to tap into the healthcare services vertical, which has in recent years emerged amongst the fastest growing verticals after banking , financial services and insurance ( BFSI). Being less affected by the recession and more open to IT spends, the healthcare space has grown in importance.

There is no Indian IT company in the top 10 healthcare service providers list brought out by Healthcare Informatics, a healthcare advisory outfit, for 2010. Global IT majors like Dell, CSC and Cognizant now have over $1 billion revenues coming in from their healthcare IT practices. Cognizant, thanks to its erstwhile parent Dun & Bradstreet, which also owned IMS Health, has a strong lineage in the healthcare practice. CSC has an over three-decade experience in healthcare IT.

In contrast, Infosys does not even report healthcare revenues, as it is not significantly large. For TCS, Wipro and HCL, healthcare in 2010 contributed less than 10% of total revenues, and ranged between $200-500 million.

But Indian IT majors are now looking to catch-up with their global peers in the $100-billion global healthcare IT market. Wipro recently made a leadership change and is recruiting senior healthcare experts to tap into the space.

India's largest IT services company TCS recently announced that it is aggressively looking for healthcare acquisitions in Japan and Germany.

Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, director for globalization advisory in Zinnov Management Consulting, said that Indian companies need to build domain expertise in the space to tap into it. Infosys CFO V Balakrishnan agrees that compared to other verticals, domain expertise in healthcare is vital due to the various regulatory compliances and complex nature of the space. He added that the company's US subsidiary set up in 2010 is building a strong healthcare management team with local talent and is getting closer to potential customers.

Acquisitions are one way that global IT companies have in the past penetrated into the space. Dell through its acquisition of Perot Systems, a leader in healthcare IT, has been able to make significant gains.

Gopi Natarajan, CEO of BPO/KPO firm Omega Healthcare, said that the major healthcare IT outsourcers are insurance firms, pharma companies and service providers like hospitals. He added that the market is highly under penetrated and opportunities are huge as only 2% of total costs in the healthcare sector go towards IT.

According to Abhishek Shindadkar, IT sector analyst at ICICI Securities, the US healthcare reform bill will throw up more healthcares IT outsourcing contracts. The country is the biggest outsourcing market for healthcare IT services followed by UK and APAC.

The new US law seeks to expand healthcare coverage by expanding medical aid eligibility, subsidizing insurance premiums, providing incentives for businesses to provide healthcare benefits, prohibiting denial of coverage and denial of claims based on pre-existing conditions, and establishing health insurance exchanges.