LIC to foray into overseas market

Kolkata: The Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) has chalked out plans to expand its overseas operations. It has, accordingly, decided to open new offices in Sri Lanka, the UAE (Dubai), Oman, Mauritius, Nepal, the US (New York and California) and the UK.

LIC chairman G N Bajpai said at an interactive session organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce here that the corporation, which is poised to end the current financial year with a business growth of nearly 280 per cent, is fully geared to meet the competition in the life insurance market.

Accordingly, he said, "we have decided to go to the markets of the developed countries whose big players are now crowding the Indian scene. We plan to stay ahead of competition, and have taken up a major reengineering of our business processes to speed up settlements, which are now at nearly 99 per cent."

The chairman said plans have already been drawn up to harness human capital in a big way through continuous training of managers at all levels. "We have finalised medium-term strategic alliances, with virtually all the IIMs for this purpose." The plan is to capture 40 per cent of the Indias insurable population of 300 million, and bring down fixed costs by adopting right-sizing strategies.