Technology is helping ICICI Prudential Life bring down its savings cost-to-premium ratio
ICICI Prudential Life Insurance’s sustained investment in technology and automation along with other cost optimisation initiatives has played a central role in bringing down its cost-to-premium ratio for the savings line of business to 13.6% in Q1-FY2027. It has reduced by 50 basis point over the previous year, even as the Company continues to scale its business.
Commenting on this, Ganessan Soundiram, Chief Technology Officer, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, said, “At ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, our investments in bolstering the Company’s digital infrastructure have not only empowered our customers but also enabled us to deliver an enhanced customer experience across their policy life cycle. We are leveraging AI, analytics and platforms such as ICICI Pru Partner Stack, IPRU Edge, etc. to strengthen customer acquisition, distributor effectiveness, servicing and operational efficiency.
When we built our technology stack, the goal was never automation for its own sake. It was about taking out the friction and the cost that come from manual processes, so that savings get passed on more efficiently and customers get a faster, simpler experience. That same thinking is now helping us to improve operational efficiency.”
Much of this efficiency has come from rethinking how a policy moves from application to issuance. Around 58% of policies issued using digital KYC and close to 54% of savings policies were issued on the same day in Q1-FY2027. The Company enables quick claim assistance through end-to-end digital claim registration, supported by real-time tracking via chatbot Ask Khushmani, WhatsApp, and AI-driven pre-claim assessment and processing.
AI-based models that support underwriting decisions are also used to predict policy persistency and assess claims, contributing to an industry leading claim settlement ratio of 99.3% with an average turnaround of just 1 day for non-investigated individual claims in Q1-FY2027. A large share of day-to-day servicing is handled through Ask Khushmani, the Company’s AI-based chatbot, while renewal reminders are increasingly delivered through a multilingual voice assistant capable of reaching up to 50,000 customers an hour, one of the few such deployments in Indian insurance.
On the distribution side, tools such as the IPRU Edge advisor app, used by the Company’s advisors, enables them to efficiently grow their business, manage operations, issue policies on the same day and deliver an enhanced customer experience.