Exclusive: 'There's never a dull moment in the insurance industry' - Ramesh Ramani, Senior Vice President, Consumer Lines, Tata AIG

At the recently concluded Ignite, CFM’s annual festival on innovation, Akhil Shahani, Managing Director, Centre for Management, asked Mr. Ramani to give a brief idea of what a management student should expect from a career in insurance.

“Students graduating in the next few years should genuinely look at insurance as a career opportunity,” said Mr. Ramani, backing up his statement with compelling figures. For example, the insurance industry has been growing at a 25% CAGR for the last 12 years. General insurance alone is a $12 billion industry and is estimated to become a $300 billion industry by 2014.

But it’s not just the growth factor that should excite students, it’s the huge capacity for innovation, Mr. Ramani believes. “Every single P of the 4Ps of Philip Kotler, we deployed. So it’s not just theory. You keep innovating on product, people, place, emotion… I think it’s a fantastic industry.”

As a case in point, Mr. Ramani talks about Tata AIG’s innovations in insurance distribution. There was a time when insurance could be bought only through the agent of the insurance company. But today, the company distributes insurance through various channels, including a home shopping channel where it receives an enquiry every 20 seconds of the 27 minutes that they are on air! As a result of these innovations, Tata AIG today issues 1,000 policies a day.

Later in the video, Mr. Ramani also talks about insurance distribution in the rural sector, which includes the use of biometric cards and RIFD tags on cattle for fraud prevention. “It’s an incredible area. It sets you thinking about how do we do this. But it’s also a huge challenge, it’s not easy to reach out.”

Mr. Ramani feels lucky to have worked for two incredible role models in his career – with Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Infotech, and Ratan Tata at his current position in Tata AIG. “Both of them talk about what impact you as an individual can make on everybody. A business should not be measured just by the profits made, but by the social impact.”

In the video, Mr. Ramani also addresses the most common grievance customers have with the insurance industry – claims. Today, through the pioneering initiative of ‘mobile claims'(see the video for a detailed account), Tata AIG can proudly say that 99% of the 12-13,000 claims made every month come over the phone, instead of through the traditional means of an agent. “The moment of truth in insurance is really claims. So what we do as an insurance company is to strive real hard to make sure that experience for the customer is wow!”