Dubai: Indian insurance firm ICICI Prudential, a joint venture between ICICI Bank and Britain's Prudential group, has opened a representative office in Dubai to offer its schemes to Indians living in the UAE.
The private life insurer's move follows growing interest among Indian financial institutions to sell their services to an estimated 1.4 million-strong Indian community.
A large number of Indians in the country work in low-paid jobs like construction workers, but a significantly large section of the UAE's biggest expatriate community consists of well-paid professionals and owners of businesses.
Important region
Earlier this year ICICI Bank and UTI Bank, the two leading Indian banks, began their operations under licences from the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) to offer wealth management services to rich Indians in the UAE.
Both target individual non-resident Indian (NRI) clients with more than $1 million in investible assets.
"The GCC is an important region for ICICI Prudential's growth plans and the UAE, as one of the fastest growing economies with a large NRI population, is key to this growth," said Bhargav Dasgupta, executive director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance.
The company will promote its insurance schemes in areas like education, retirement and health. Being a representative office, ICICI Prudential will not be selling its products in the country.
At the end of 2006-07 financial year ending March 31, the company held assets of about $4 billion. It generated $1.11 billion of premiums and wrote over 1.96 million retail policies during the year.
