At the end of 2006, AEGON signed a new partnership in India with the Ranbaxy Promoter Group. Together, the two companies are setting up joint ventures in life insurance and asset management. For AEGON, the Indian market offers exciting prospects: a young, growing population and a new economic vibrancy that is driving demand for life insurance and other long-term savings and investments.

“One of the first things that strikes you when you first come here is the sheer scale. India is a huge market, not necessarily in terms of dollars or euros perhaps, but in terms of the potential demand and the number of policies we’re writing. You can’t really call yourself a player unless you’ve got a hundred branches. A lot of the work we’ve been doing has been focused on putting a solid distribution network in place.

Since we announced we were going into India, we’ve been hiring like crazy. I think we’ve done more hiring here in the past few months than we would do in ten years in Edinburgh. We’re putting in place a ‘hub and spoke’ model – a strong central office, running various agencies, which might be nothing more than the room in someone’s house. We want to reach not only the cities but also the rural areas where there are also pockets of wealth.

‘Feet on the street’ is a big thing here – having the salesmen in the right place across the country selling your products for you. Consumers in India are just like those anywhere else in this respect. They want to see the whites of your eyes before making a major financial commitment.

The prospects for the Indian market are tremendous. The thing you have to bear in mind is that India has a very young population, more so than in China, for example. That means there’s a huge supply of labor feeding economic growth. In recent years, the Indian economy has been expanding at a rate of more than 8%. With that growth you’re getting the emergence of a new middle class and more nuclear families, rather than the traditional, extended families. Increasingly, the attitude now is that people have to do more than in the past to look after themselves. So, people have more to save and they have more reason to save. In terms of customer needs, we’re really pushing on an open door.

There are ten of us in all from AEGON UK working in India, plus another two from the Netherlands. We do six weeks in the country, then ten days back at home. Together, we have more than 200 years’ worth of experience, across all the various disciplines: IT, finance, sales, policy design. What we’ve been doing is putting the whole chain in place from the products, to the sales, to the back office. We want our legacy in India to be one of quality. We want all the right processes and controls in place, so we know where every rupee belongs, where it comes from and where it’s going. So, eventually, when we hand over to new management, we will have laid down a foundation for an effective, well-run business.