Reading the back pages of policies since 1994

In 1994 my father, a mathematics teacher in Thanjavur, fell ill and stopped paying the premiums on an endowment policy he had bought to fund my education. When he asked what the policy was now worth, the answer was a small fraction of what he had paid in. Nobody had cheated him. The policy had been designed for a man who would never miss a year, and it had been sold to him without anyone asking what would happen if he did. I was seventeen, and the letter explaining his paid-up value was the first insurance document I read closely. I have been reading the back pages of policies ever since.

I studied mathematics at Marudham College of Arts and Science in Chennai, graduating in 1998, and completed a master's degree at the Pazhaverkadu Institute of Statistics in 2000. My first job was as a trainee with Kaliyur Actuarial Consultants, a small Chennai practice that valued gratuity and leave liabilities for employers. I passed four of the actuarial profession's examinations there and three more later, before deciding that I wanted to shape products rather than certify them. It was a deliberate choice. I have worked beside actuaries all my life and rely on their judgement; my own interest simply lay with the customer at the far end of the calculation.

In August 2002 I joined Ambalika Life Assurance Company Limited in Pune, one of the first private life insurers after the market opened, as a pricing analyst. I built profit-testing models for endowment, term and unit-linked products, and in 2005 became product manager for the unit-linked range in the years it grew to most of our new business. My most useful work there was a lapse study nobody had commissioned. Roughly one regular-premium unit-linked policy in three stopped paying before its third year, and the customers who stopped had mostly been sold the largest premiums relative to their income. That was when I understood that lapse is decided at the moment of sale.

I wanted to see that moment for myself, so in 2007 I moved to Sindhavi Bank Limited in Chennai to manage insurance products across its 620 branches. It was an uncomfortable education. In 2008 and 2009 I watched unit-linked policies being offered to depositors as though they were deposits with a better rate, sometimes by relationship managers who did not understand them either. We introduced a needs-analysis form, a second signature for customers over sixty and an incentive paid partly on renewals. When the regulator lengthened the lock-in on unit-linked policies to five years and capped their charges in September 2010, our branches were readier than most for the change.

From 2012 to 2016 I led insurance and client protection at Sevvanthi Microfinance Limited, a Chennai lender to 2.1 million women across four states. The sector was still recovering from the 2010 Andhra Pradesh crisis, and trust in anything attached to a loan was thin. Every borrower carried group credit-life cover, yet when a borrower or her husband died, the family often waited two months while loan officers kept visiting. We rebuilt the process so that branch staff gathered the documents, the insurer settled within days and the family received the surplus over the outstanding loan. The median wait fell from 64 days to 11. Sitting with widows in branch offices in Madurai and Jabalpur taught me more about product design than any pricing model has.

I joined Varunashree Life in September 2016 as head of savings and retirement products, became head of products in 2019, the year we listed, and was appointed chief product officer in April 2021. I try to be honest about the order of events. The fixed-return savings plan that later concerned us most among older bank customers grew strongly while I was head of products, and I did not stop it soon enough. When I became responsible for every retail product, I started with that one.

I lead 140 people in product design, customer propositions, benefit illustrations, sales journeys and regulatory filing. I ask each product owner to know three facts about their product without looking them up: its thirteenth-month persistency by channel, its complaints per 10,000 policies and what a customer who stops in year two receives. I chair our management product committee, which approves every launch and withdrawal before the Appointed Actuary certifies the pricing and the product is filed with IRDAI, and I take our product strategy to the board each year. My working relationship with the Appointed Actuary is close and sometimes argumentative, which is how I think it should be.

Inside the industry I am known, occasionally with some weariness, for three positions: that persistency belongs to the product team rather than to sales, that surrender values should be shown before maturity values, and that India's protection gap is mainly an underwriting problem. I am now preparing for a second role beside my executive one, as an independent director of a company whose customers make long commitments they cannot easily check.

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