Finance Maverick: Supriya Rathi | Entrepreneur

Supriya Rathi has worked in commercial banking with Hongkong Bank in South East Asia for 18 months post her bachelor’s degree in Finance and marketing. Thereafter she completed an MBA in Finance from Stern School of Business, New York University in 1998 and got married and moved to Mumbai the same year. She then started working in the family business – AnandRathi Financial Services. The Anandrathi Group is a financial services conglomerate, founded in 1994 by Anand Rathi, her father in law. In 2001, as part of the financial reforms, the insurance sector was privatized and insurance broking became an attractive opportunity. As a financial services group, they envisioned synergy with their other businesses and were among the first corporates to receive direct insurance broking license in 2003.

Our strength is in deep diving into the client’s business, understanding the operational risk exposure and preparing customized insurance solutions to mitigate that risk.

In the initial stages she formed a core team that was a hybrid of experienced peers from public sector general insurance companies as well as young professionals. Talking about the impact of the business, she says, “Majority of our customers are large corporate clients to whom we provide the full range of insurance placement and servicing solutions. Our strength is in deep diving into the client’s business, understanding the operational risk exposure and preparing customized insurance solutions to mitigate that risk. We currently service as many as 2 crore end insured clients through our corporate B2B2C solutions.”

Her biggest barrier was acceptance of insurance brokers in public sector companies most of whom traditionally managed their insurance operations directly through the public sector insurers. For the first few years they saw a huge retail opportunity for life and health insurance and scaled the physical distribution channel rapidly. While business grew, they saw operational challenges in managing quality of selling through the physical retail distribution mode.

Sharing her future plans she says, “We have been growing organically at about 35% CAGR for the last 5 years. In the last two years we have strengthened the organization structure to build on our competitive advantage and diversify into few industries to expand the corporate insurance reach. We have started the POS distribution model recently as part of diversification from corporate business. Going forward, we see huge inorganic opportunities for growth through acquisitions and strategic joint ventures.

Close to 60% of their top line is driven by women who are heading key business units and who have been a part of the core team for 10 -15 years. Out of their total workforce, 32% is female.