The New India Assurance Company Limited CC-Jun25.pdf · 2025-07-30
Excuse me, we are not clear what you asked. Can you repeat please?
Yes, so actually on this credit rating, we have been credit rated by AM Best for quite some time now and unfortunately in the year 2018, we were downgraded to B++ from A-Excellent and since then, we have been working consistently to see that we go up back to our A rated status and in that endeavor, we have been consistently trying to improve our ERM methods, the technology usage, the kind of resilience across all parameters, risk management initiatives, we have employment of technology to ensure that there are no gaps, all of this we have been trying to do across the last few years and most particularly in the last year, we have made some significant strides in this area. We have put certain, or wherever we have had audit observations and audit paras from our statutory auditors, we have actually put our teams, a task force to address each of these unreconciled amounts and as a result of that, you can see that the last quarter and this quarter, we have taken a few of the unreconciled amounts which are pretty old, very old balances to our P&L, we have written them off and so that we clean up the books permanently for the future. At the same time, to be future ready and to ensure that such things do not repeat, we have created certain verticals within the company to address these procedural lapses so that, because of the transactional inconsistencies and delay, these things were happening and therefore, we have put address all those gaps. We expect that this will be a total cleanup for the future and we will not see these kinds of instances in the future. Apart from that, we have strengthened our ERM team. We have completely drawn up a risk map, heat map which was there. We have improved on it. We have taken the help of one of the big three in ensuring that we get the, the absolute state of art, knowledge transfer, the best practices in the industry for addressing this, to make ERM best in class for this industry and I think there has been a significant improvement from there. We have adopted technology in a big way to ensure that these gaps which were there in the procedures and processes, they addressed to a large extent and we have seen significant improvement in the way our teams have reacted to this, the way these processes have cleaned up and brought more accountability to the table of each and every employee. The way we are able to measure TAT, when it comes to claim settlement or, in fact, even for underwriting, we are able to find out where and on which table the delay is happening and these things, I think, are something which are permanent in qualitative terms and this would bring continual rewards for this company every quarter that we go. Okay. I understand and thank you for such a detailed answer and my second and last question is around what's the output for combined ratio in second half? Any internal targets or levers to improve it? Is there any target in the management team you have forecasting for FY'26 — FY'27? Yes. So, last year, we had a phenomenal year when we brought down the combined ratio from 119 to 116, which is not a mean feat to achieve for such a big entity, a global entity. So, it was definitely something we really worked on in the last year and we brought in significant change. The same things hold good this year. Additionally, this 1st Quarter has not moved in terms of NEVI INDIA ASSURANCE combined ratio because there were a few large losses that affected this particular quarter and the one from Air India was a once in a while kind of a loss and otherwise, possibly, we could have seen a traction there also. But going forward and I think the kind of initiatives we are taking, we are very sure that internally, we have set ourselves improvement in combined ratio by another 3% this year, which I think should be achievable at the current point of time.