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Insurance is the seventh most profitable sector in the BT500 list despite thin margins and limited number of listed players. Technology adoption and product innovation may keep it buzzing over the next few years

- BY ANAND ADHIKARI

IF CHINESE PRIVATE sector insurance giant Ping An Insurance were a bank, its $158 billion revenue would place it alongside UK banking giant HSBC and Spain's Santander, and ahead of Royal Bank of Canada. Though it matches investment banking giant Goldman Sachs with assets of $1.77 trillion, its $17.6 billion profit is well below HSBC's $22.97 billion and other banks with similar scale. This explains the nature of the insurance business—lower leverage, higher claims, limited product suite, and modest investment yields, all of which keep margins lower than in banking.

In India, things are no different. Despite this, insurance was the seventh-most profitable sector in FY25, with profits of listed players rising 16% to ₹65,255 crore. The biggest, LIC, outshined at the 6th spot in the BT500 list, though its annual profits were lower than ICICI Bank's and only half the country's largest bank, State Bank of India. These challenges, and the fact that India has less than a dozen listed insurers, is reflected in contribution of the insurance sector to BT500, which was just 3.93%. Experts, though, say this is likely to rise if insurers can keep up the kind of growth they reported in FY25.

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