“Facing
rejections always helps in polishing and improving ourselves. So, never fear
the interview rejections” as rightly said by one of the powerful
personalities in the Insurance sector, Mr. Rajendra Ghag who is Senior
Executive Vice President & Chief Human Resource Officer at HDFC Standard
life during his visit to MYRA on 11th September 2015.

Mr. Ghag
is also the Head of Excellence department at HDFC Life. This department looks
after the welfare of the employees, their physical and mental well-being, their
mentoring and other human resource development activities. The excellence team
also hosts a Jigyasa HDFC life management trainee program though which the
administrative sector teams are hired.

HDFC
Life was established in 2001 with an aim to become the most established player
in the Insurance segment. HDFC life is a merger between standard life and HDFC
both dealing with pension plan, insurance plan and Unit link plan (ULIP). In
the current market scenario, when insurance companies take such a long time to
get to break-even point, HDFC Life zoomed to 8th position by
2008-09 and secured 2nd position by 2011.

Mr.
Ghag shared a brief history and insight of the insurance domain. During 2007,
when the stock market points were around 21,000, it was projected that stocks
would raise to about 40,000 by the year 2008. This drove all stock investors to
make over investments. During this period, all the insurance companies sold
ULIP like hot cakes. Many insurance companies had 85% of its share in Unit link
and 15% in insurance, but HDFC life was a bit skeptical of this projection and
made an even bet of 50% in ULIP and the other half in insurance. Eventually
there was a crash in the stocks leading to the recession period, due to which
many insurance companies are still yet to reequip from the dip. Since then,
insurance firms take long periods to come to break-even point. HDFC life was
the super brand for the year 2011/2012. HDFC life would soon be the first life
insurance company in the world to make it into stock listing.

The
market potential is untapped because there are a lot of target customers. Any
individual above the age of 18 and earning annually are eligible customers for
availing life insurance. Currently only 13% of the customers are enrolled, so
approximately 80% of potential customers could be targeted.

The
excellence team at HDFC life always engages employees to create a fine balance
of professional life and personal life by having Employee engagement clubs.
Such clubs aim to promote internal talent, continuous learning, to inspire
leadership, and develop leaders.

Apart
from the insights of Human resource development, we did get to know how HDFC
life works on maintaining reputation ratio, which depends on time taken to
clear the claim i.e. from the claiming to approval. This process has a high
margin of spurious claims which are dealt by a special wing who specifically
deal with the early claims.

The
session as a whole was more of a deep dive into the insurance domain than
merely being a normal lecture. After walking out of the Athena auditorium at
MYRA, we had a new perspective about the insurance domain and we are now
aspirational about the abundant opportunities in this field. We truly are
thankful to Mr. Rajendra Ghag for enlightening us with his invaluable industry
experience in the insurance sector. This talk has certainly made us eliminate
all the norms we had about the insurance industry, considering the numerous
opportunities available to learn and grow in this field.

Varun
S – PGDM1

(The MYRA School of Business)