InsureRelaxInfo: April 2016

LIC among top lenders with largest bad loan

Newslaundry.com, which claims to have sourced a secret Reserve Bank of India (RBI) list of top corporate loan defaulters, had one interesting statistic (among others) in its report; Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) is owed Rs 65,700 crores by these defaulters.

At the end of December 2015, LIC’s gross Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) as a percentage of its debt portfolio stood at 4.23% compared with country’s largest lender State Bank of India’s (SBI) 5.1%.

Now, LIC is not in the business of lending. However, it has a loan portfolio of Rs 1 trillion, and held corporate debentures and bonds worth at least Rs 2.7 trillion at the end of March 2015. Thus, at the end of last financial year, gross bad loans were Rs 12,213 crores and constituted 3.3% of its debt portfolio.

As per estimates, using its NPA ratio of 4.23% and assuming a 10% growth in its debt portfolio since March suggest a gross bad loan number of close to Rs 17,000 crores at the end of December 2015.

While that is nowhere close to SBI’ gross NPAs of Rs 72,791 crores, it is enough to place it in the top lenders with the largest bad loans.

But the problem with LIC is that its debt investments are a black box, apart from the suspicion that successive governments have used its balance sheet to bail out disinvestment programmes and prop up equity markets.

Moreover, it has to deploy 15% of funds raised from traditional plans in infrastructure. Now that is the industry which is responsible for close to 30% of banking NPAs, almost double its share of advances. This scenario can also lead to massive conflict of interests.

There are prudential norms that insurance companies have to follow like how they recognize NPAs, what kind of instruments they can invest in,

Etc. But then, banks too have such norms and still showed a 28% sequential rise in NPAs in December quarter after RBI asset quality review.

Thus, leave alone its investments in shares of public sector banks, which RBI has raised concerns about, LIC’s loans and infrastructure investments merit a closer look because of the systemic implications it has on financial stability.

good morning everybody inspirational vidio

vinay mohanty

15 highest individual taxpayers for 2015-16

vinay mohanty

SHIS health scheme for disability persons

vinay mohanty

don't give pan card information to railway reservation

Don't give PAN number for railway Tatkal booking as proof of ID.
.

The Railways display the PAN. name, sex and age of passengers on reservation charts pasted on railway compartments.

This is a boon for benami transactions. It is
mandatory for traders like jewelers to collect tax
(TCS) from customers on purchase of jewelry worth
Rs 5 lakh & bullion worth Rs 2 lakh.
To accommodate high net worth customers, traders
have a easy source of benami PAN numbers, name, sex and age from reserved railway compartments.

A traveller recently noticed a chap copying PAN particulars along with name, age and sex pasted on
reserved compartments, and when confronted with
the help of railway police, he admitted that he
gets Rs 10 per PAN particulars from jewellers.

These persons are copying PAN information of
senior citizens, women etc from sleeper class with
the intention that passengers in sleeper class are
not serious tax payers and generally salaried class..

In that case the department will first initiate action from the tax payer's side asking him to explain the sources of money for the above
transaction done in his name
and also to prove that he has not carried on the above transaction..

You may quote your driving licence #, Voter ID # etc as your ID Proof but definitely not your PAN.

Beware!!!!.

Spread this msg to all ur frndz and relatives.
vinay mohanty

diabetes will be the world's seventh largest killer by 2030

down-lode your ID cards now from mediassist site

now you can downlode your LIC agents group mediclaime ID cards(only club members) from
www.mediassistindia.com, ....https://ecard.medibuddy.in...... policy No. 120300/34/15/0500000002 valid up to 31-8-2016
vinay mohanty

happy ugadi

vinay mohanty

globaly top agents

vinay mohanty

the agent of 100 crore policy

Every time Venkateswara Rao Vakalapudi thought of aninsurance agent, the image that came to his mind was of a pesky person thrusting insurance policies under people’s noses. This was one profession he was certain that he never wanted to pursue. Yet, today he is Life Insurance Corporation of India’s (LIC) record-breaking star insurance agent.

Last year, he earned LIC Rs 51 crore worth of fresh business, an industry record. To put this in perspective, 60 per cent of insurance agents in India do business worth Rs 2 lakh to Rs 3 lakh a year.

Vakalapudi, 42, who grew up in a village in West Godavari in Andhra Pradesh, today drives a Range Rover Sport, has a sea-facing bungalow at Vizag, has high net-worth individuals (HNI), non-resident Indians (NRIs) and corporate houses as his clients and travels around the world for business and to give motivational talks.

This is the busiest time for him. Between January and March, when people rush to buy insurance policies, he works 18 hours a day. Catching him is not easy. It takes a series of interviews over days to get a sense of his life and work.

A farmer’s son, Vakalapudi wanted to become an engineer but flunked all subjects and had to drop out of the engineering college he went to in Hyderabad. His father, disappointed, wanted him back in the village to help in the fields. But Vakalapudi had other plans. He says he could not return to the village a defeated man. So, with the help of a cousin who worked with State Financial Corporation, he got a loan of Rs 50,000 under the unemployed youth scheme and started a notebook manufacturing business. He was 19 then.

By the time he was 23, the business bombed and Vakalapudi had accumulated a loss of Rs 15 lakh. Bankers, financiers and suppliers started hounding him. Now he started a parcel services agency that earned him a monthly commission of Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 — not enough to pay back the debt.

In 1997, his father died. Vakalapudi went into depression, moved back to the village and starting helping his brother with the farm. But he soon shifted to Vizag and started a poultry business. He would collect feed from companies like Hindustan Unilever and Godrej and sell it to farmers for a credit. The going was good. He repaid his debts. But three years later, the farming community found itself in stress. Business plunged.

Around his time, some of Vakalapudi’s friends from the engineering college in Hyderabad moved to Vizag. Besides helping them relocate, Vakalapudi introduced them to his insurance agent from whom he had bought a policy for himself and his mother. But the agent was erratic and his friends weren’t satisfied with him.

When he casually mentioned this to his “godfather” and uncle Krishna Babu, an MLA from Rajamundry, over breakfast, Babu turned to him and said: “Why don’t you become an insurance agent and help your friends?”

“I don’t want to be recognised as an insurance agent; people run away from them,” Vakalapudi recalls replying. Babu persisted and, three months later, Vakalapudi took the plunge.

In the first year, he sold 12 insurance policies, six to his friends and the rest to his customers in the poultry business.

The breakthrough came in 2001. LIC’s popular policy, Jeevan Shri, was to be discontinued. His development officer, K Raghu, told him to rush and sell the policy to his friends and family before it was scrapped. In 15 days, Vakalapudi did business worth of Rs 4 crore and earned Rs 4 lakh as commission. (Typically, an insurance agent’s commission ranges from 2 per cent to 30 per cent, depending on the value of the policy.) “He was very clever in how he tapped this opportunity and converted many of his business associates into his clients,” says Raghu, who has trained about 350 insurance agents in the last 25 years.

Vakalapudi was selected as member of Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), a premier association of financial professionals in the world. The five-day MDRT meet he attended in Las Vegas changed his perception towards the profession. “I realised an insurance agent is like a doctor,” he says, “helping people manage their lives and needs.”

In the second year, he sold an insurance policy worth Rs 1 crore for which he got a commission of Rs 11 lakh. But this was to his uncle, Babu.

The real learning was yet to happen. It happened when he sold a Rs 10-lakh policy to an HNI customer. Two years later, he learnt that the same person had now bought another insurance policy — worth Rs 1 crore — from some other agent.

Instead of coming back to Vakalapudi, the man had gone to another agent. This called for introspection. He decided to rethink the way he engaged with and built his relationship with his clients.

“Vakalapudi’s approach is different from other agents,” says Raghu. “He first sells himself to the prospective customer before he sells the product.” He listens well, tries to closely follow the customer’s needs, inspires confidence in himself and then offers the policy, says the development officer. It is this unique attitude and approach that has made him successful, Raghu adds.

Vakalapudi now has two offices, at Hyderabad and Vizag, and a 15-member team. He has launched a financial consultancy called Anand Jeevan.

For an insurance agent to survive and thrive, networking is critical. Vakalapudi realises this, more so because 90 per cent of his business comes through referrals.

Initially, he tapped his friends and the Telugu diaspora living in the United States. He continues to reach out to them by sponsoring events, organising social activities and helping at temples.

“The logic is simple: I invest a certain percentage of whatever I earn in organising local functions. This helps me network and brings in more customers,” says Vakalapudi, who has around 200 NRI clients. In all, he services about 4,000 customers and aims to take that number up to 1 million by the end of 2020. He also wants to start tapping the retail sector.

As of now, the success rate is 30 per cent to 40 per cent — of every 100 people he approaches with an insurance policy, 30 to 40 translate into business.

“He is a trainer and motivator for many,” says Raghu. “But he also attends as many training sessions as possible to get better at what he does.”

The Rs 51-crore record has only added more steam to his momentum. This is, after all, a figure many LIC branch offices with a strength of 300 agents put together couldn’t achieve.
vinay mohanty