Life Insurance – Death Claim Settlement Ratio – 2011-12

Claim Settlement Ratio is probably the most important factor while buying insurance. This becomes even more critical for Life Insurance as you would like your dependents to run pillar to post to claim your sum assured in case of unfortunate death. The recently published Insurance Regulatory And Development Authority – IRDA Annual report 2011-12 has the death claim settlement ratio for the following 24 life insurance companies in India.

Death Claim Settlement Ratio:

The table below gives the Settlement ratio for the above Life Insurance Companies based on Number of Claims:

Some Insights:

1. LIC has the best Claim Settlement Ratio of more than 97.4%
2. DLF Pramerica has the worst payout ratio of 24.5%. But DLF is new in insurance and the Claims are just 223, so nothing can be concluded about its claim ratio
3. ICICI Prudential, HDFC Standard and SBI Life have claim settlement ratio of more than 95%.
4. ING Vysya, Reliance, Tata AIG, Metlife, Sahara, Future Generali, Shriram Life have more than 1000 claims and still low claim settlement ratio.

Some More Points:

Life insurance companies have a very high rate of rejection in the ‘early claims’ – so if there is a claim made within 2 years of taking the policy, there is a far greater chance of it being rejected. So all the companies which have started operation in last five years would obviously have low settlement ratio.

You can read the previous Claim Settlement Ratio for Life Insurance Companies for 2010-11 and 2008-09.