The high flier

Shikha Sharma, CEO, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, talks to V Jagannathan on what keeps her company at the top.

Shikha SharmaChennai: Though industry rankings have changed amongst the private sector life insurers, the Mumbai-based ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company Limited continues to hold on to its top rank ever since it started operations.

Says Shikha Sharma, chief executive officer, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, "The company has grown at 148 per cent CAGR over the past three financial years. It has emerged as the only private life insurer to have crossed a number of milestones with amazing regularity, the most recent being the Rs6,000-crore figure of funds under management (FuM), making its asset base the largest amongst all private life insurers."

According to her, long-term funds account for the bulk of the investment of the FuM. "Though no new penetration figures are available for life insurance, it is evident that penetration is increasing as private life insurers spread their wings and focus on capturing both depth and breadth of different locations," Sharma says.

She also says that the rural segment offers significant scope for expanding the life insurance business. "We recently crossed the five-lakh policy mark for rural and social sector policies. This is a testament to the scalability of the rural operations we have built up."