Reliance Nippon Life plans to add 30,000 new agents in FY'17
Reliance Nippon Life Insurance, a part of Anil Ambani-led Reliance Capital, plans to add over 30,000 new agents in this fiscal as part of its drive to grow the agency force.

With the addition, the total agent strength would increase to 1.6 lakh by the end of this financial year, Reliance Nippon Life Insurance Chief Agency Officer Manoranjan Sahoo said.

The company plans to add over 20,000 agents in the first half of the fiscal and further increase it by 10,000 in the second half, he said.

The company added 47,692 agents, the highest number of individual agents amongst private insurers, last year taking its total agent counts, on net addition basis, to 1.3 lakh in 2015-16, he said.

"The recruitment drives are being conducted in major cities and we are seeing a good traction from non-metro and urban areas. Our focus, this time, is on adding maximum number of agents from South and North India as we believe the insurance penetration in these areas are low. We are initiating aggressive drives in these regions," he said.

"While we are aggressively looking at increasing the number of agents, we are also looking to adopt best practices with regards to enhancing productivity, customer services and persistency from our partners," he said.

Nippon Life Insurance has over 94.9 per cent persistency and the team has been helping us deploy some of their processes that have been framed, evolved and perfected over the last 125 years experience, he added.

Reliance Nippon Life, a joint venture between Reliance Capital and Nippon Life Insurance of Japan, reported a new business premium of Rs 1,558 crore, renewal premium of Rs 2,840 crore, total premium of Rs 4,371 crore for the year ended March 31, 2016.