New India Assurance's Dubai COO: The UAE Has as Many Insurers as India, Serving a Fraction of the Business

Lavanya Mundayur, COO of New India Assurance's Dubai operation and the first woman to head a GCC operation for the company, offered a striking structural observation about the market she now runs: the UAE has roughly as many insurers and brokers as India, despite writing only a fraction of India's premium volume. "Nobody's a fool," she said of why so many players keep entering a market this crowded relative to its size. "People invest in a place only when you see some potential for the present or for the future." The low penetration rate that looks like underperformance to an outsider reads, to industry participants, as unrealized upside -- which is exactly why competition keeps intensifying rather than thinning out on its own.

An overcrowded market that won't self-correct

Mundayur's read on where that overcrowding leads is unambiguous: either regulator-driven pricing discipline -- "some kind of tariff protection" -- or consolidation, because relying on the market to police itself doesn't work. "Self-discipline really doesn't work at the end of the day, because everybody has other challenges to manage," she said. Without some external constraint, she expects insurers to keep folding or being forced into mergers rather than the market naturally settling into a sustainable equilibrium. Notably, she flagged this as a view she'd independently arrived at in a separate conversation with Badri Consulting's Hatim Maskawala -- two people looking at the same market from very different vantage points (a multinational branch operator and an actuarial consultancy) reaching the same structural conclusion about where UAE competitive intensity is headed.

Why New India isn't chasing market share

Against that backdrop, Mundayur was explicit that New India's UAE strategy is deliberately conservative rather than growth-maximising. "One can afford to think about market share and top-line-driven growth only when you have that kind of investment return, or investors, or simply put -- money to burn," she said. "Burning capital is a conscious call... as far as New India is concerned, we would go conservative. We are here to ensure that we sustain."

That framing is worth sitting with as a counterpoint to the venture-funded, growth-at-any-cost playbook more visible in the region's insurtech coverage. New India's UAE operation, by her account, isn't a top-10 or top-15 player by premium -- "somewhere in the middle" -- and isn't trying to be. The stated priority is protecting roughly 60 local jobs and building a sustainable book rather than buying share with underpriced business. Her broader point about timing reinforces the same patience: "Insurers piggyback on the economy... one has to be patient. These things don't happen overnight." As the region's non-hydrocarbon economy matures, she expects the underlying opportunity to materialise on its own timeline rather than one that can be accelerated by discounting.

From serving one diaspora to competing as a normal market player

The historical arc of New India's presence in the UAE adds useful context to that conservatism. Founded by the Tata family in 1919 and later nationalised, New India expanded into 28 countries specifically to fill a gap: in British colonial-era markets with significant Indian populations and Indian industrialists, Indian customers often weren't getting fair pricing or coverage from British insurers. New India entered as, in effect, a service provider for an underserved community rather than a conventional competitor. In Dubai specifically, Mundayur relayed an account from a veteran surveyor on the Insurance Business Group board: when he arrived roughly 50-60 years ago, there was effectively one British insurer (Royal) and New India -- nothing else.

That monopoly-adjacent position is long gone. Today, many of the UAE's insurers and brokers are themselves headed by people of Indian origin, several of them former New India employees, and New India competes as one player among many rather than as the default choice for Indian expatriates. "We are no longer in that monopoly situation," she said. "From that situation, we have shifted... today we are there to provide services to all." The fact that a majority of its customers remain Indian, she was careful to note, is now simply a function of UAE demographics -- roughly 85% of the population is expatriate -- rather than a deliberate diaspora-focused strategy.

How the life insurance industry "destroyed the concept of risk" in India

On why India's insurance penetration sits under 2% despite the industry's long history there, Mundayur offered a specific, somewhat unusual explanation: the life insurance industry itself is partly to blame, for conflating investment returns with risk protection for decades. "Instead of looking at investment products separately from risk products, we have gone and mixed up the two," she said. "The life insurance model has kind of destroyed the concept of risk in India" -- consumers learned to evaluate a policy as a savings vehicle with a return, not as protection against a loss they might never experience.

She's more optimistic about the next generation, whom she sees as considerably more risk-conscious than their parents. But converting that awareness into actual purchases runs into a separate, purely actuarial problem: affordable pricing requires volume, and volume requires younger, healthier buyers entering the pool alongside older ones. "If you have only people who are 45 years and above taking out medical insurance, that scheme is bound to fail," she said -- the classic anti-selection spiral, and one that ultimately can only be solved by getting a population that doesn't yet perceive its own risk to buy anyway. She credits mandatory corporate health insurance with doing more for genuine awareness-building than any marketing campaign, simply by putting a policy in front of employees who wouldn't otherwise have gone looking for one.

Rural inclusion, and why brick-and-mortar micro-offices still matter

On extending coverage into rural India, Mundayur described a model that blends technology with a physical presence many assume digital distribution should have made obsolete. New India runs more than 1,000 offices in smaller towns and rural areas out of roughly 2,000 total -- many originally opened for financial-inclusion purposes, some of them, she admitted candidly, later closed because they weren't financially viable. The reason the physical branch still matters in these belts is comfort: a walk-in customer dealing with an agent or branch head they can see and talk to, in markets where that trust hasn't yet transferred to a purely digital channel.

What's changed is what happens once that trust-building visit occurs: Kerala's agent network, for instance, now runs almost entirely on agent portals, letting even small-town agents issue policies digitally on the spot. The clearest proof point came during Covid, when New India issued policies without a single service gap despite lockdowns, and where roughly 90% of claims -- disproportionately small-ticket motor claims -- are now processed through system-driven survey allotment rather than manual handling. The economics behind this are blunt: an agent physically collecting a ₹500 premium, where the travel cost alone runs ₹50-100, simply doesn't work without digital tools closing that gap.

Technology spend judged strictly by return, not by buzzword

Mundayur was pointed about New India's approach to technology investment generally: it's evaluated on fit and return, not fashion. "There are some companies who talk a lot about cloud. We don't talk about it," she said -- migrating to cloud infrastructure makes sense only when data-access patterns and server scale actually justify the cost, not as a default modernisation move. The company's real, if less publicised, technology wins are specific and quantified: automating small-ticket claims settlement that had previously required manual handling of "lakhs and lakhs" of individual claims, building video-streaming capability into agency partner onboarding, and -- most concretely -- a health claims platform fast enough to settle near real-time, which she credits directly with winning corporate clients away from competitors even where New India wasn't the cheapest bid. "Our facilities have compensated for that gap," as she put it -- technology as a lever to defend margin, not just cut cost.

Insurtech versus web aggregator: a distinction the market keeps blurring

One definitional point Mundayur pushed back on is worth flagging for anyone tracking the region's digital insurance players: "insurtech" and "web aggregator" get used interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing. An insurtech, in her framing, is a digitally-native insurer -- underwriting its own risk on its own platform, in the mould of a Lemonade. A web aggregator, like Policybazaar, is a distribution and comparison layer sitting on top of insurers who still carry the risk. New India treats aggregators as simply another intermediary channel to plug into -- alongside brokers and its own direct sales -- rather than a fundamentally different category of competitor, and is actively working to smooth data integration with them regardless of how digitally sophisticated any individual platform is. For a market where the regulatory framework for web aggregators specifically is still, in her words, "a work in progress," that distinction will likely matter more, not less, as the category matures.

What this means for the region

Mundayur's closing message was aimed specifically at women and at anyone underestimating their own readiness for a bigger role, drawn from her own experience of being pushed into assignments -- a large corporate and broker office, a regional leadership post -- she didn't initially believe she was ready for. "When you push them, they go on to do an excellent job," she said of the pattern she's observed repeatedly, not only with women but with anyone from a less privileged background lacking early confidence. For an industry that, by her own account, is structurally overcrowded and heading toward consolidation or tighter regulatory discipline, that talent-development lens matters beyond individual careers: the insurers that survive a shakeout will be the ones that built management depth broadly enough to weather it, not just the ones that priced most aggressively while the window was open.

This post draws on the FS Brew episode 15: A Foreign insurer with a long history in the UAE- New India Assurance.