ICICI Lombard happens to be a public listed company have its headquarters in Mumbai, India. It was formed in the year 2000 as a partnership with ICICI bank and the ratio was of the order 74.26. It happens to be the second largest bank in the country and icicilombard has collaboration with Fairfex holdings, a Canada based financial firm. It got its approval from the IRDA and started its operations in the year 2001.

The company not only restricts itself to insurance products and it offers solutions as far as project schedules, implementations along with export as well as import services. The company has been a trendsetter of sorts and quite a few new domains have been established by the company. It was the first company in the country to start the telecalling options and had achieved rapid strides. But in recent times this has turned out to be a dampener because of the tough restrictions imposed by the Telecom regulatory of India which has made the do not call option. In fact the company too has a do not call option embedded as part of the work culture. In addition to this another feather in the cap of the company was it became the first company in the country to offer policies online. All the transaction needs of the individual were taken care of by the online platform and the car insurance policy of the company was the first to go online

Another feature of the company was it started the scheme of weather insurance with close to 2 million farmers. The agricultural belt of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan were some important states covered by this scheme. The whole philosophy of this scheme was that India happens to be an agricultural country and the life of the country is agriculture. In this scheme close to 30 varieties of crops and 7.6 million acres of land will be covered. Other than this the company has achieved all the major awards. Some of them are the best in terms of customer satisfaction by the J.D power Pacific and in recent times it has achieved the NDTV profit leadership award. All these awards are a real achievement of a company which has hardly 25 years into its operation. A superior work culture along with a host of other innovative strategies have made it reach the position where it is today.

Now considering the other side of the coin, the company has had its own share of controversies as well. In the year 2005, the Insurance development and regulatory authority asked the company to drop the loan shield policy from their domain. This happens to be a credit guarantee for the banks and acts as a coverage for the bank against any sort of defaulting payments . This applies in the case of loans only. The reasons could be many in stature like accidents, illness till the age of 50 years and in certain cases even may be death as well.

The author is an insurance agent and has more than 20 years experience in working with banks and insurance companies. She has also worked as an insurance advisor for major sectors like Health, Education and Travel Insurance covers and has extensive understanding of policy purchase and claim settlement issues.