Peerless, National Insurance to part ways

KOLKATA: Private sector Peerless General Finance & Investment Company and public sector National Insurance Company (NIC) are breaking ties. The two had come together to provide a combo service since June 2005. Peerless does not want to distribute NIC’s mediclaim and other general risk covers to its customers anymore. According to its managing director SK Roy, the post-claim services from NIC are not finding much takers in the Peerless network.

Mr Roy said: “Peerless customers are, therefore, gradually losing interest. Though we’ve not stopped selling NIC schemes yet, we’ve definitely slowed down the push-process. We are talking to a variety of private sector health insurers, all of whom are very keen to tie up.” NIC chairman V Ramasaami said: “We’ve not received any official complaint from their side. So, it is difficult to comment.”

According to NIC insiders, Peerless had unofficially voiced its concern to some of the senior NIC officials over its alleged lacuna in servicing. “Sometimes back, on being approached by Peerless unofficially, we had agreed to resolve the issue. But we couldn’t act upon as there was no official complaint,” said the insider. Peerless had entered into an MoU with the insurer for taking up its corporate agency for general insurance products.

“A formal detailed discussion would have prompted us to take corrective measures like routing all the policies sold by Peerless through a different branch, or may be taking a pro-active approach so that polices are serviced better. We could also have put in place strategies to solve the problems,” an NIC official said.


The MoU included an yearly contract, which would to be reviewed and renewed every year.“As we kept on receiving negative feedback from our customers, we’ve not pushed NIC’s products and actually sold a very number of policies,” Mr Roy said.

Following this, private sector general insurers are all keen to join hands with Peerless, which enjoys an enviable network of agents. Peerless has 155 branches and 10 regional offices across 100 towns and 55 cities, offering a vast market. It has over one lakh agents to sell financial products throughout India, especially among the middle and lower-middle-class population.