LIC to Launch Participatory Products

De-growth in policy sales is a result of the amendments to the product portfolio that we had to do in response to the (Irdai) master circular, effective October 1, 2024.

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How is LIC looking to address negative growth in policy sales?

When the master circular [on surrender value] got implemented, we had to completely modify all our existing product portfolio. Some products had to be modified because of the need to introduce surrender value at the end of one-year and some because there were some underlying assumptions and regulations. So, in effect, we had to modify almost all products, and that has resulted in a strain in the number of policies being sold because we had to increase the minimum sum assured of the most popular plans from 100,000 to 200,000. And we also had to tweak the commission distribution ratio from the first year to subsequent years.

Having said that, de-growth is coming down. In August, September, we hope to see the de-growth being wiped out, and in H2FY26, because of the low base, we hope to show good growth. We are looking at an early double digit over last year in the number of policies.

Do you aspire to report high margins like private players?

For an organisation like us, we need to balance between customer benefits and margin. We have to see that customer benefits are given prime importance and in that process, LIC should grow and also show some margin. LIC has been a very heavy participating (par) products player. From 2022, we took a directional change. We started increasing our focus on non-par products and slowly improved their share, in terms of APE [annual premium equivalent], from 7 per cent to 30 per cent. Margin will show a good increase towards the end of the year. In FY26, our focus will be to show an incremental growth in margin