Sop for Reliance Life agents

Anil Ambani's Reliance Life Insurance Company has introduced a new agency format under which agents will be paid a stipend during training against the current practice of earning commission from the very beginning, a move that is expected to lessen the pressure to perform of the trainees and help them to learn better.
Called the career agency distribution format, this model is followed by Reliance Life's Japanese joint venture partner Nippon Life Insurance. Reliance Life said this format was the first of its kind in India.

Under the distribution model, sales trainees will receive a fixed stipend during their six-months training period. On the completion of training, the career agent will receive a licence and move to the variable commission-based payout structure.

Reliance Life plans to hire 5,500 career agents across 220 branches by this fiscal. The Anil Ambani-led insurance entity has already recruited around 2,500 agents in over 150 branches across the country. It will hire about 3,000 agents in the next three months.

The company had a distribution network of 1,230 offices and over 1,50,000 advisers as on March 31, 2012.

"The main aim of the career agency distribution format is to support new recruits during the learning phase so that they can concentrate on training and learning the ropes rather than being under the pressure of generating business to earn commission from the very first instance," Malay Ghosh, president and executive director, Reliance Life Insurance, said here today.

Reliance Life plans to focus on smaller cities to recruit the prospective agents.

"The basic objective of this distribution model is to increase the number of the sales people in the field working for the company full time," Ghosh said.

This is the third distribution model introduced by Reliance Life this year. Earlier, the company launched the Life Plaza and Face-to-Face models.

The career agency distribution format is a highly successful sales adviser model of Reliance strategic partner Nippon Life. The company has also incorporated some of Nippon's other practices such as meeting of company representatives and policyholders at least once a year to maintain a long-term relationship.