Does the claim settlement record of your insurer inspire confidence?

Despite repeated warnings by the experts, Indians continue to buy life insurance policy to either save tax or as an investment product. Neither of them, as explained numerous times in the past, is a prudent choice (except for a Term policy).

However, there is a rare and tiny minority that is smart enough to appreciate this and is willingly buying insurance for insurance purposes only. For this informed and enlightened tribe, claim settlement ratio is an important decision-making input when making a choice among umpteen insurers.
Claim settlement ratio simply means the percentage of claims settled by an insurance company out of the total claims received by it in a given period. In other words, it indicates the likely chances of money being paid out to the nominees in case of any unfortunate eventuality.

As per IRDA's Annual Report 2012-13, there were 24 insurance companies providing life insurance cover and their claim settlement record for FY 201-13 is as under:

Insurance Company	Total Claims	Claims Settled	Claim Settlement Ratio
Aegon Religare	422	282	66.82%
Aviva	2433	2134	87.71%
Bajaj Allianz	27282	24192	88.67%
Bharati Axa	1046	936	89.48%
Birla Sunlife	9871	8149	82.55%
Canara HSBC	597	528	88.44%
DLF Pramerica	614	166	27.04%
Edelweiss Tokio	22	10	45.45%
Future Generali	1941	1369	70.53%
HDFC Standard	6253	5988	95.76%
ICICI Prudential	14948	14393	96.29%
IDBI Federal	687	550	80.06%
India First	916	654	71.40%
ING Life	3312	2780	83.94%
Kotak Mahindra	3089	2843	92.04%
LIC	750576	733545	97.73%
Max Life	9051	8531	94.25%
PNB Metlife	2405	2017	83.87%
Reliance Life	21412	18511	86.45%
Sahara	955	809	84.71%
SBI Life	13426	12676	94.41%
Sriram Life	1602	1079	67.35%
Star Union Dai-Ichi	738	662	89.70%
Tata AIA	4884	4125	84.46%

(Insurance companies with 90%+ claim settlement ratio in bold and those less than 80% in red)

Note: It must, however, be mentioned that since private insurance is relatively new to India, the data set is still small. Hence the numbers may not truly reflect the actual claim experience. In next few years, as the data achieves a reasonable size, we would be able to get a more meaningful insight.