An expert insurance broking firm thoroughly understands its client’s business and risk management philosophy. It mitigates the risk by highlighting astute market knowledge and providing accurate insights about the best financial services, including insurance covers.
It also aids customers throughout the servicing to the claiming stage. Thus, the perfect insurance broking company not only intermediates, solicit and negotiates on behalf of its client, but it fights for its customers’ rights.
Anand Rathi Insurance Brokers Ltd (ARIBL) has been doing it since its inception in 2003. It is a part of the Anand Rathi Group, a leading financial services company with a pan-India presence.
ARIBL is one of India’s major indigenous insurance brokers focusing on large corporate clients, especially in the BFSI space. In the recently concluded World BFSI Congress, ARIBL received the following awards:
- Specialist Broker of the Year
- Broker Service New Category – Sarathi
- Commercial Recruiter of the Year
Rajesh Sharrma, CEO and Principal Officer of ARIBL, states, “We have a strong team of insurance professionals working across the country, including major metros in India.
We provide customized insurance advisory across all services and industrial sectors like Manufacturing, Infrastructure and Banking on the entire gamut of insurance products.
Our products include the standard property and engineering insurances, bundled products such as banker’s blanket bonds, crime insurance, error and omission covers, marine covers, employee benefit plans, liability policies such as directors and officers liability, product liability, commercial general liability, etc.”
A Leader to reckon with
Recently, Rajesh also won the ‘CEO of the Year by Global HR Excellence’ award. He has over 25 years of rich experience. He worked with Mahindra Group for 20+ years, of which 17+ years were at Mahindra Insurance Brokers Ltd (MIBL). In 2003, he moved as a part of the founding team to MIBL, where he worked for 17 years before joining ARIBL.
During his long career, Rajesh was heading all the verticals, including corporate sales, retail, and reinsurance. His last assignment was as the Principal Officer of the firm, looking after the P&L of the company.
After the opening of the insurance sector, the IRDAI issued regulations for insurance brokers in the year 2002, thus also paving the way for direct insurance brokers to enter the market.
Rajesh adds, “We felt that the insurance sector presented a great opportunity in a dynamic growth environment.”
The broking sector, especially the direct side, threw up interesting challenges like risk management and high-quality intermediation were at a nascent stage in those years. In those years, the insurance sector primarily operated in a straight-jacketed environment with offerings only from the PSUs.
However, the entry of direct brokers and the private sector insurers presented opportunities to reach out to customers with better insurance solutions and service excellence.
Exciting Challenges
Before 2003, insurance companies directly dealt with corporate clients and their offerings were limited to standardized terms and coverages.
Rajesh states, “When we entered into the insurance broking business, we realized that insurance awareness was low and market penetration was around 0.56% in non-Life and about 2% overall.
The retail sector, especially for life insurance and health insurance, appeared attractive, and we expanded our network in this direction.
However, after a couple of years, we re-examined our strategy, entered more aggressively into corporate sales, and gradually developed niche expertise and dominance in offering bespoke insurance solutions in the BFSI space.”
For example, some of the improved insurance policies in the liability and employee benefits segment have been adapted across multiple organizations.
However, like any other business environment, new challenges keep emerging. In the current scenario, an extremely competitive environment, dynamic technology landscape and managing client expectations in a highly price-sensitive market continue to provide exciting challenges.
Excelling the Benchmarks
According to Rajesh, there are many USPs that make ARIBL stand out as a trusted insurance broking company. These USPs are, “At ARIBL, customer-centricity is at the core of what we do, backed up by service excellence and end-to-end solutions.
We have a 50+ strong claims team with rich domain experience in claims management.
We systematically engage with our clients throughout the year as per pre-agreed programs, which, inter alia, include regular knowledge exchange, webinars, and bulletins to keep our clients updated.
We also provide flexible technology solutions through our portal and apps developed by our in-house development team.”
Subjugating the Pandemic
Generally speaking, the pandemic years were somewhat tough to acquire new clients, whereas renewals were managed more easily. However, Rajesh says, “We at Anand Rathi Insurance Brokers Ltd. (ARIBL) acquired significant new clients with our innovative sales and marketing approach and proactive offerings.
We created more virtual touchpoints through webinars and proactively reached out to them to help them manage their business through the pandemic without any interruptions.”
At ARIBL, the multiple challenges posed by the Covid-19 crisis were effectively managed by taking the following steps:
- Effective communication: Customer and employee engagement were really ARIBLs top priority. Consistent and effective communication and interaction have been vital in strengthening the company and its culture. Regular online group meetings with its clients and webinars were held.
For employees, training sessions, Conferences and Townhall were organised on a monthly basis to encourage transparency and a bottom-up communication strategy.
- Mental and physical well-being: Rajesh adds, “We went the extra mile for our clients and employees during these testing times and assisted in hospital admissions, supply of critical equipment and procurement of drugs, etc.”
Lockdown showed that social distancing and isolation made employees more sedentary and dependent on digital devices.
Thus, Rajesh states, “We introduced workshops that helped employees deal with stressful situations.”
- Performance efficiency: Established a cross-functional team to coordinate the activities of different business units and monitor and provide necessary information to the leadership. Developed an effective management decision-making process under various scenarios analysed the priority of ARIBL’s projects to focus the team’s efforts on the most essential and critical tasks and allow more flexibility with low-priority tasks.
- Digital adaptation: The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the digitisation of customer interaction by several years. It was also the time to reset, pivot and think big to transform ARIBLs business operations to match new digital expectations.
Rajesh adds, “Customer experience and support, regulatory compliance, process management and quality control are a few aspects where we have built firm foundations on the digital front.”
- Safety culture: shared perceptions of the importance of safety and confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures effectively created a safe work environment. It demanded that employees strictly follow safety standards to not only ensure their own safety but that of others as well.
A Leader to reckon with
As an established industry leader, Rajesh’s advice to the budding entrepreneurs and enthusiasts aspiring to venture into the insurance broking industry is well thought out, “As insurance brokers, we are the representatives of our customers and always have their best interests.”
So, one must have a strong relationship with the Insurance Company for seamless claim settlement. A well-networked entrepreneur can go a long way in the insurance broking business.
This industry is ever-growing, and one must be on their toes with the latest news and trends in the business to stay ahead of their competition.
Ideally, one must have a strong understanding of how insurance products work to find the policies that best suit their clients’ needs at a reasonable price.
Syncre-Tech Chariot of Future Synergy
Regarding his envisioning ARIBLs future stronghold, Rajesh says, “Broadly speaking, we envision further strengthening our organization by holding our sway in the BFSI sector by offering innovative insurance products and services and expanding our presence in the infrastructure and manufacturing sectors.
As business paradigms shift, we have consciously adopted a synergistic and syncretic approach within the organization to improve the performance of our different verticals.”
This has helped ARIBL to achieve a better outcome of the interdependent initiatives.
Rajesh adds, “To leverage the growing awareness and need for life and health insurance, we launched a complete seamless, paperless, assisted point of sale (PoS) business model and branded it as Sarathi.”
API integration of the portal with ten insurance companies for 16 products was completed in six months (the shortest possible time) for personal lines of insurance products. This portal is live and has already touched thousands of lives in a short period.
Rajesh terms ARIBLs tech-adoptions efforts as innovative. He says, “We have implemented robotic process automation (RPA) and optical character recognition (OCR) for key operational processes resulting in better efficiency, speed and accuracy.”
Finally, Rajesh concludes faithfully, “We strongly believe in our 250+ strong and growing team of young achievers, who drive the agenda of our customer-centric philosophy enshrined in our motto – persistent investment in acquiring expertise, regular skill development of members and acquisition of the latest and modern tools required for “forging forward fearlessly” as our logo suggests.”
