Siam City Insurance targets more schools
SIAM CITY Insurance has added four protection features to its group personal-accident-insurance scheme for students as part of its attempt to lure former school clients back to the company.
Komsan Thongtan, senior executive vice president, said the company was offering the new features to around 10,000 schools, with protection for dengue fever, influenza, diarrhoea and hand, foot and mouth disease.
There is also protection for cremations, emergency medical services for transport back to patients’ home towns, the transport of mortal remains, and death from accidents as a result of using public services.
“Students might have more educational activities in Asean from the Asean Economic Community. Therefore, the company designed this protection to make it different from other insurance players,” Komsan said.
He explained that the company should develop more features as riders for basic coverage because this would help lure former school clients back to the company.
The premium for basic coverage is Bt150 per student for an insured sum of up to Bt50,000. Schools interested in the four features will have additional premiums of Bt20 per student.
In general, schools will purchase insurance for an insured sum of up to Bt70,000.
Komsan said the company’s loss ratio for group personal accident insurance for students might increase from 61 per cent to 63 per cent but that would be offset by an increase in premium income.
Last year, the company reported premium income from group personal accident insurance for students of Bt465 million, covering 5,455 policies. In 2014, it recorded income of Bt415 million from 5,200 policies.
“The existing private schools [clients] have renewed policies with us at 100 per cent because the private schools chose insurance [based on] services and convenience, but some government schools have to make tenders, where pricing is one of [the factors determining] their choices,” he said.
He said government schools had a renewal rate of up to 75 per cent, and represented 90 per cent of the company’s school client base.
Komsan said the company had targeted Bt550 million in premiums from group personal accident insurance for students this year, with it dominating the segment.
The are more than 40,000 educational institutions in Thailand and up to 15,000 of them purchase insurance, meaning the premiums from this segment are not attractive enough to entice many insurance companies to tap the market.
At present there are only five firms in the segment.
Komsan said the market would grow if more schools and parents saw the importance of protecting children.
However, he said it was not easy for schools that had never purchased insurance to do so because parents had to agree to it.
Amid the economic slowdown, parents want to reduce expenses and therefore annual premium income from the segment is not likely to rise above Bt1.5 billion, he added.
