The online term life insurance market is heating up with more players entering the fray. The premium is now similar to personal accident cover offered by non-life insurance companies. Is it sustainable? Are the products priced too aggressively? 

Many insurers like LIC, HDFC Life, Bharti AXA Life, Tata AIG life are set to come out with term plans which may be pure online or combined with offline mode of distribution.

Term life insurance used to be almost three times expensive than personal accident cover offered by non-life insurers. Not anymore. It is now at par and if the trend of race to the bottom continues, term life premium can be unsustainable. While personal accident covers disability as well as death, the trigger has to be accidental which needs a lot more documentation like police first information report (FIR), post-mortem report and so on. Term life without a rider will cover death which may or may not be due to accident. The current online term premium rates are a good deal for customers, but the competition is just getting started.

Some of the current online term plans may re-price the products with 10% to15% lower premium for a specific target segment based on lifestyle. Increasingly insurance companies are offering discounted premiums for non-smokers, female policyholders and now will start looking at detailed lifestyle like occupations to arrive at a reduced premium. There may be a proportionate increase in sum assured for existing customers to ensure they get benefit of the re-pricing initiative.

According to Deepak Yohannan, “There are sceptics who scoff at this claiming it to be un-sustainable—that only time can tell. At least it has forced the large players to sit up and play the game with the new rules being set by others. Complete disruptiveness at it best and I think the life insurance industry will see a lot more and it will not all be restricted to pricing.”

A new product ICICI Pru Life iCare tries to address the major hiccup with the online term insurance buying process. The medical tests which online term insurance products require for all (or higher age groups) has been done away with this innovative product. There were issues like premium hike after medical tests which used to catch customers by surprise. This one-of-a-kind product will have no medical tests and no surprises of premium hike. This is online term plan in complete sense.

Recent entrants DLF Pramerica U-Protect and Edelweiss Tokio Life Protection have premiums which are the lowest in offline term plan space. Their premium is Rs5,956 and Rs5,984 respectively for Rs50 lakh sum assured for a 27 year old non-smoker male based in Mumbai for policy term of 25 years. Both the products are offline as of now.