Guardian Life– leading with inclusive insurance for over 8 years

Guardian Life Insurance Limited (GLIL) has been operational since 2014. The major sponsors of the company are Apex, BRAC & Square. Since inception, GLIL has been a strong proponent of inclusive insurance. Harnessing the power of business partnering and the latest in insurtech, GLIL has become a thought leader of the industry within a very short time. Being the largest corporate insurer of the country, they are now navigating the retail market. GLIL currently has 55 physical offices all over the country to give support to the retail customers and over 12,000 advisers who are delivering life insurance services across the country. It is Bangladesh's fastest-growing life insurance company, covering over 11 million lives.

Guardian Life is striving towards setting new benchmarks in the industry through insurtech. Every step of the process is being made more customer friendly and transparent. We are the pioneers of full end-to-end digital platforms like EasyLife & MyGuardian that provide swift policy purchase experience via eKYC and smoothest customer services. Inclusive insurance has been at our core since the inception and now we are trying out new business partnering models banking on our insurtech platforms. We have recently introduced omnichannel customer experience to elevate the service level further. Innovation has made GLIL the frontrunners of the insurance boom.

— CEO Sheikh Rakibul Karim, FCA

Guardian Life Insurance Limited offers a wide range of services for risk management and long-term protection. GLIL's primary commercial products work with B2B business models. GLIL's commercial line products are classified into three categories: Group Insurance, Bancassurance, and Microinsurance.

Group Insurance: Guardian Life is partnered with over 345 leading corporate organizations across the country. As a result, more than 400,000 lives are covered by the protection, and over 113,000 health claims and near about 1000 life claims have been settled. Over BDT 247 crores have been paid in health and life claims over the last 8 years which is a commendable payout rate.

Bancassurance: Bancassurance is a joint venture between a bank and an insurance company that allows the insurance company to sell its products to bank customers on the bank's premises. GLIL has signed a standard operating procedure (SOP) with the country's leading multinational bank, Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), to begin this service once government approval is obtained. This firm is one of only two or three local insurers that offer dedicated credit shield services to bank customers. Already a total of 128,000+ lives are covered and the amount of claim settlement till date is over BDT 20 crore. Besides, number of current Partner Banks/NBFI is 13. Some of these names include, BRAC Bank Ltd, AB Bank Ltd, Mutual Trust Bank Ltd, Lanka Bangla Finance, South Bangla Agricultural Bank Ltd, Midland Bank Ltd, IDLC Finance Ltd, Prime Bank Ltd, Meghna Bank Ltd, IDLC Asset Management Ltd and the aforementioned Standard Chartered Bank.  Its team of experts is ready to analyse the needs of its partners to create an innovative, cost-effective solution designed to enhance the value added services (VAS) for its (partner) customers.

Microinsurance: GLIL made a breakthrough with Guardian-BRAC Bima (GBB), which brought GLIL's credit shield microinsurance products to around 5.6 million BRAC Microfinance users (10+ million including spouse). BRAC is the world's largest non-governmental organization, and GLIL provided insurance protection to their microfinance clients, of which 83 percent are women. Since its establishment, over 110k microcredit borrowers' claims have been resolved, totalling over BDT 515 crores, with the pay-out ratio for claims being 99 percent for GBB Project.

EasyLife is Guardian Life Insurance Limited’s complete Digital Life Insurance solution app

Apart from commercial products Guardian Life has focused on providing services through robust online services which they have been developing for a good part of the last five years. The first major milestone came with the launch of MyGuardian App & Portal back in May 2018 to ensure smooth digitized policy services. Then with the launch of EasyLife App in September 2018, Guardian Life introduced the first-ever Digital Life Insurance of Bangladesh. Later on, the digital journey of Guardian life got bigger and better with eKYC integration to EasyLife – the first insurance eKYC of the country. GLIL also provide 24/7 customer service department, an Ai based chat-bot for both Facebook and Whatsapp seen first time in Bangladesh.  Being "customer first" always, they bought omnichannel communication systems to serve customers better. Guardian Life Insurance provides claims settlement in 5 days and through the ACPS portal, claim submission is possible in just 3 minutes.

The latest addition to the digital channels is the alternate distribution model (ADC). 27 strategic partnership agreements have been signed-off with organizations from different industries among which 12 ADC projects with Robi, bKash, Nagad, Jotno, OK Wallet, Carnival, DocTime, Upay and Truck Lagbe and few more in-App projects have already gone live since the very beginning and are now fully operational. Their project with Robi has expanded their reach to 12000 retail stores covering across 64 districts. The latest addition to the ADC channel is the inclusion of ready-made garments (RMG) sector of Bangladesh partnering BKash. Currently the Bkash-RMG project is being piloted at 30 garments factories of Bangladesh where more than 30,000 RMG workers are being offered easy and inexpensive life and health insurance solutions. The rate of uptake among garments workers is very impressive.     

GLIL has also developed and implemented EasyLife Micro-Health Policies in digital platforms through ADC Channels to a good response. To date, app install numbers are 260k and active app user numbers are over 200k which shows immense success and resonates with Guardian Life's innovative vision for digitization.

The company is moving strong with robust CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) over the years; Total Premium grew by 112%, Life Fund by 127%, Assets by 68% & Investments by 67% respectively. Management expense ratio is also the lowest in country standing at 17.86% in 2020.

As of 2021, the company has covered over 11 million lives through its various innovative business models, while maintaining a claim payout ratio of 97%. Automated Claim Processing System (ACPS) launched in 2021 has also helped to reduce the average claim processing time by 60%. Currently, the average settlement duration is 5 days which is comparable to international market standards.

Guardian Life prioritizes all types of life insurance for covering diverse people groups in our country, believing in "Insurance for All". There is no doubt that GLIL has a very strong Business to Business (B2B) or commercial product line, such as Bancassurance, Corporate, and Microinsurance to protect a large community and their dependents. The retail business is also growing at an unprecedented rate. With over 340,000 claims worth over BDT 1,000 crores paid out over 8 years, Guardian Life is demonstrating their strong presence in the insurance sector.