Insights

Our vision is to build an enduring institution that serves the protection and long-term saving needs of our customers with sensitivity. We are focused on creating the best outcomes feasible for all of our stakeholders, customers, employees, communities and of course, our habitat - planet Earth. Sustainability is at the heart of our vision and our efforts are directed towards ensuring “sustainable value creation”.

Sustainable value creation is built upon the three pillars of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) framework. “E” involves taking initiatives and measures that reduce the carbon footprint and sustainable use of resources, “S” involves giving back to our communities and society at large, “G” is about building trust through transparency in overall functioning.

The benefits of imbibing sustainable business development practices are multi-fold - including enhancing, attracting and retaining talent, promoting inclusive growth and improving our overall commitment to the greater social good. In a nutshell, the commitment to sustainability ensures that our organisation flourishes despite facing ongoing environmental challenges and that we leave our planet a better place than we found it for our next generation.

Our ESG focus areas

Commitment to the Environment

As a financial services organisation, all of our ESG initiatives are based on the core ethos of responsible consumption and recycling wherever possible.

Responsible Consumption:

Reducing our carbon footprint and conservation of resources like paper, water and energy are our top priorities. We reduce the use of paper by leveraging digital solutions for all sales and customer-driven interactions. Building this awareness is of paramount importance and we engage in regular communication with all employees requesting environmental sensitivity and the shift from paper to digital wherever possible. Similarly, our two largest offices are equipped with sensor-based taps with our new office having a sewage treatment plant. Currently, we operate throughout 470 offices and have deployed 5-star rated inverters, VRF air-conditioners, as well as LED and sensor-based lights to reduce energy consumption. We have also recently hired an external consultant to keep us on track with measuring and tracking our carbon footprint and identifying initiatives to help us reduce our overall carbon consumption.

Adopting Green Energy:

Minimising the environmental impact through responsible consumption of energy is a part of our "green energy" strategy which we use at major offices in Mumbai to reduce our overall carbon footprint. Currently, six of our offices in Mumbai are meeting these energy requirements through service providers by providing green (renewable) energy. We will progressively extend this to other offices as well going forward. We, additionally, regularly use indoor plants in all of our offices to help improve the overall air quality.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle:

The reduction of waste by recycling and reusing wherever possible is imperative to our strategy. To achieve this we have instituted a centralised facility for stationery, digitalised sales stationery and stopped the consumption of single-use plastics across most offices. Similarly, we have largely transitioned to a digital learning model where most team meetings and reviews are conducted digitally in order to reduce business travel and the organisation’s overall carbon footprint. Our e-waste is similarly disposed through government-approved vendors with disposal certificates.

Social Growth:

Given the broader objectives of a life insurance business, we are committed to driving inclusive growth. With the goal of focusing on the socially and economically weaker sections of society and driving the larger agenda of financial inclusion, we have designed micro-insurance products such as "Shubh Raksha”, “Sarv Jana Suraksha" and "Anmol Bachat” which are products that enable customers to drive long-term savings and provide a financial safety net to families. In FY2022, these products enabled us to cover 27.4 million lives, bringing the total coverage under micro-insurance products to 45.6 million lives as of March 31, 2022.

We have partnered with various banks, including ICICI Bank to promote the Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Beema Yojana (PMJJBY), a government initiative. At the end of March 2022, approximately 524,024 lives were covered under the Company’s PMJJBY scheme. As part of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, the Company spent ₹ 68.2 million during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With our “life insurance” products having a larger social objective of mitigating the financial vulnerability of families in the event of the breadwinner’s demise, we have developed sales collaterals in multiple regional languages to make our products easier to understand and accessible to a larger cross-section of customer segments.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I):

We promote an inclusive culture and have instituted a DE&I policy with an emphasis on encouraging the growth and retention of women employees at the workplace. Over the past two years, women constituted more than 40% of our campus hires and as of March 31, 2022, women comprised an overall 27% of our workforce which was up from 26% as on March 31, 2021. In the first quarter of FY2023, we instituted a Diversity Council headed by our Chief Distribution Officer with the objective of steering the DE&I agenda to make the organisation more inclusive.

In our product development cycles, we endeavour to incorporate features to address women-centric needs. In line with that, we incentivise women customers to start their savings journey as soon as possible with our product - ICICI Pru Lakshya.

People Development:

We believe that our unique employee talent pool gives us a competitive edge and is a key differentiator in the market. Accordingly, we are invested in improving the overall wellness, quality of life and the learning and development of our people. We customise our policies to cater to the life-stage needs of our multi-generational workforce with policies that enable employees an access to physical, mental and financial health. Through digital learning and virtual classroom initiatives, the Company delivered approximately 1.2 million learning hours in FY2022.

Risk Management:

Transparency is key to building trust. We therefore function in a transparent manner and have a robust risk management architecture in place. We are also focused on ensuring that our digitalisation solutions address key data privacy and security issues while providing customers with a safe and secure mode to conduct transactions.

Governance:

As an organisation, we are committed to adhering to the highest standards of ethics and corporate governance. We have continued to build upon the existing governance structures, policies, processes and controls that support and promote accountability, transparency and ethical behaviour within the organisation. We stay resolute in our pledge to create and reinforce an enabling culture where employees feel respected and empowered to do what is right for our customers, communities and shareholders.

Responsible Investing:

We are a significant institutional investor in the capital markets. As a part of our focus on responsible investing, we have integrated the ESG framework in our investment process to ensure that we invest and operate responsibly. This has been done by putting in place a publicly disclosed stewardship policy. We have also subscribed to ESG ratings provided by a recognised external service provider. This aids in providing ESG ratings and descriptions as additional inputs to our investment team for making investment decisions. We also have a dedicated resource in the investment team to manage the ESG framework.

Currently, our entire investment team is being trained to understand ESG aspects better while evaluating a company. We also apply the restriction criteria based on ESG factors to any company that derives more than two-thirds of its revenue from thermal power, coal, arms & ammunitions or weapons of mass destruction, and tobacco industries.

Impact on the ground:

As a result of our focus on ESG issues, we became the first Indian insurance Company to sign the United Nations and supported Principles for Responsible Investment, a framework to support sustainable and responsible investments. In October 2021 we also launched an ESG-focused Sustainable Equity Fund benchmarked to the Nifty 100 ESG Index, becoming the first life insurance Company in India to do so.

Our steadfast focus on ESG issues has enabled us to save approximately 1770 tonnes of carbon footprint in FY2022. Similarly, this year our MSCI^* ESG rating improved from a B to an A, and the Sustainalytics^** ESG rating improved from a ‘Medium Risk’ to ‘Low Risk’. We believe that we are the highest ranked ESG Company by both MSCI and Sustainalytics in the Indian life insurance industry. Recently, FTSE Russell improved our ESG rating score from 3.3 to 3.7. Also, we are the only Indian insurance Company to be featured in the list of top 100 ‘India’s Most Sustainable Companies’ by BW Businessworld, in association with Sustain Labs Paris.

In line with our purpose, our efforts are focused towards ensuring that every Indian family has adequate financial protection while, also taking into account our wider responsibilities towards our people, planet and the society.