Comparative Performance of Distribution Channels of Public and Private Life Insurers in India

ABSTRACT: Selling products through an intermediary has always been advantageous for the manufacturer of goods or service providers. This becomes more relevant when you are selling services and particularly a financial service. The selling of insurance products is in the ambit of financial services. Therefore, the relevance of intermediary channels has increased to the highest, because selling insurance product is a subject of persuasion, so personal contact to increase market efficiency become relevant. In the present study, an emphasis has been made to study the marketing channels exhausted by the life insurance industry for selling their products, further, a comparison has been made between the public and private sector companies concerning to channels these two companies are using to sell their insurance products. The span of the study is 2016-17 to 2021-22 because during this period a few new marketing channels came into existence in the insurance market. The performance of these channels has been measured in terms of first-year individual premiums collected and policies issued by these commonly used distribution channels. At last, it is found that in the case of Life Insurance Corporation of India, the channel ‘Individual Agent’ is more significant as compared to other channels; whereas Corporate Agent-bank is significant for private life insurance companies. To conclude two way ANOVA and Tukey Post Hoc test have been applied to the data