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The objective of writing this case study is to allow management students to engage with the complexities of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the insurance sector in an emerging economy like India. Upon completion of this case study, the students will be able to critically evaluate the business environment of the insurance sector of a developing economy like India, analyse the impact of M&As on the insurance industry of India, appraise the post-merger consequences and strategies to deal with these consequences, assess the applicability of market power and growth theories in the context of M&As and develop a strategic action plan for handling post-merger challenges.

On 3 September 2021, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) approved the “Scheme” related to the merger of the non-life insurance division of Bharti AXA General Insurance Company Limited (“Bharti AXA”) with ICICI Lombard General Insurance Company Limited (“ICICI Lombard”). Earlier, on 21 August 2020, the boards of the companies had approved entering into definitive agreements through a scheme of arrangement. The merger received approvals from different regulatory bodies as mandated (Gandhi et al., 2023). Bhargav Dasgupta, managing director and Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Lombard, stated, “This is a landmark step in the journey of ICICI Lombard, and we are confident that this transaction would be value accretive for our shareholders” (FE Bureau, 2020). However, the merger posed a dilemma for Dasgupta and the management regarding crop insurance owing to its impact on profitability. Crop insurance historically had high claim ratios nearing 135% for ICICI Lombard for financial year 2018. The company ceased to underwrite this product from 2019 onwards (TNN, 2019). However, ICICI Lombard had to fulfil the three-year commitment made by Bharti AXA to the state governments of Maharashtra and Karnataka towards crop insurance. It was a scheme initiated by the Government of India, covering farmers against losses due to cyclonic rains, rainfall deficits and other unforeseen calamities. Dasgupta faced a challenge in managing the interests of the farmers and the company’s shareholders while balancing profitability, which had already been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. This case study delves into post-merger complexities in the financial sector non-life insurance industry in emerging countries like India.

This case study is suitable for undergraduate and post-graduate management students and executives from the insurance industry.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.

According to Global Healthcare Security Index 2021, India ranked 66 out of 195 countries, indicating the need and scope for improvement. The Cooperative healthcare system which has been rendering exemplary services is yet to gain visible recognition in India. Given the need for upgrading the health infrastructure in India and providing more affordable health services to the country’s growing population, it would help appreciate the large role that cooperative healthcare can play along with others. This study explores the structure, conduct, and performance of healthcare co-operatives in India, the factors contributing to their success and failure, and the challenges they face. The Health Cooperatives have a strong presence in Kerala and Karnataka and are also coming up in other parts of the country. However, a detailed database of them for public awareness is very limited. The cooperative hospitals can meet the basic requirements of curative treatment in rural and poorly-endowed urban areas. The democratic way in which they function makes them a destination for a financially weaker section. They must retain this feature. The study covers two successful cases which reveal that India needs a more dense healthcare cooperative network. Since cooperative hospitals in tune with the spirit of service run on the principle of being ‘Not-for-Profit’ they need to be supported by the governments more liberally, without however interfering with their governance and administration.

Healthcare is indispensable for any civilisation to attain a good quality of life and well-being on both mental and physical levels. The healthcare domain primarily falls under pharma, medical, biotechnology, and nursing. Also, other fields may be aligned with these primary fields. Healthcare amasses the contemporary trends and knowledge of upcoming techniques to improve healthcare processes. The practitioners are primarily doctors, nurses, specialists and health professionals, hospital administrators, and health insurance.

It is a fundamental attribute needed for any society to attain good quality of life and well-being in mental and physical health. It is a fundamental right of people to receive good healthcare where drug treatment and hospitalization are available at a nominal cost, as a requirement of today’s modern era. There appears to be a significant disparity in the availability of good healthcare in rural areas compared to urban in India. Even though we enter the digital era with the facilities offered in Industry 4.0 and other advanced technologies brings about a significant change of overall processing within healthcare systems. During the pandemic of COVID-19, there has been digital transformation with success globally. Healthcare cooperatives are a new norm to support the healthcare systems globally. The chapter discusses Gampaha healthcare cooperative and reviews Ayushman Sahakar scheme in India. The reforms require time to evolve.

Purpose: This chapter is based on risk management of the insurance sector with reinsurance as its linchpin. Such is the importance of the insurance sector that its risk management must be considered.

Need for the study: Risk management of various sectors is gaining much attention. The insurance sector, known to manage the risk of multiple sectors, also requires its own chance to be controlled with the same or even more intensity. Considering the importance of reinsurance coupled with the dependency of primary insurers on reinsurers and the absence of research on reinsurers, the need to conduct a comprehensive study on the topic is felt.

Methodology: It will be a conceptual chapter based on the rigorous literature on the topic integrated with the researcher’s insights to bring forth the framework of reinsurers for the readers.

Findings: It is found that insurers can themselves become the victims of the financial crisis in case they insure risks that surpass their economic boundaries. Not only this, the failure of insurance companies can have a ripple effect on the country’s economy. Therefore, insurers must possess financial resilience; to remain so, they need to have prudent management of the risk they are undertaking.

Practical implications: The study covers a relatively less researched area of reinsurance and hence has a vast scope of research in the future. The study would be helpful to stakeholders like regulators and primary insurers. It will unveil the paradigm of reinsurance and enlighten the stakeholders on how to use it effectively.

In the era of Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0, the integration of digital technologies, automation and data-driven insights has generated a broad wave of transformation across all industries, including the insurance sector. The study focuses on determining how the adoption of these technologies (InsurTech) is changing the life insurance industry, ultimately enhancing the level of customer satisfaction.

The data analysis has been performed with 304 useable responses from the policyholders of life insurance in the north-west region of India. The methodology adopted for this study is partial least squares (PLS) structural equation modeling (SEM). To investigate the predictive relevance of customer satisfaction, the PLS predict technique has been used. Also, importance performance map analysis (IPMA) has been applied to assess the important and performing dimensions of customer satisfaction.

The outcomes show that the adoption of InsurTech has a positive impact on customer satisfaction. Customer service management and policy management are among the strongest predictors of customer satisfaction, and the predictive relevance is reported to be moderate. IPMA results have suggested that improvements in online distribution of insurance services and customer service management lead to higher customer satisfaction.

The conceptual model can be tested with the moderating effect of different demographic factors (age, gender etc.), and future research can be done to analyze the mediating role of customer satisfaction between InsurTech adoption and customer loyalty.

The study offers valuable contributions to the marketing literature, shedding light on the influence of InsurTech adoption on customer satisfaction within the Indian life insurance sector. The research offers a practical approach that could help marketing professionals and policymakers comprehend the utilization of online insurance services, and this understanding can help industry experts to develop customer-oriented products and services.

This research is the first of its kind to test the association between InsurTech adoption and customer satisfaction in the life insurance sector in the Indian context. Research also provides novel insights for policymakers to enhance the satisfaction of customers towards using online insurance services in the near future in developing countries like India.

Purpose: Preserving a country’s culture is crucial for its sustainability. Handicraft is a key draw for tourism destinations; it protects any civilisation’s indigenous knowledge and culture by managing the historical, economic, and ecological ecosystems and perfectly aligns with sustainable development. It has a significant role in creating employment, especially in rural regions and is an essential contributor to the export economy, mainly in developing nations. The study focuses on the skills required and existing gaps in the handicraft industry, its development and prospects by considering women and their role in preserving and embodying the traditional art of making handicrafts.

Approach: A framework has been developed for mapping and analysing the skills required in the handicraft sector using econometric modelling; an enormous number of skills have been crowdsourced from the respondents, and machine learning techniques have been used.

Findings: The findings of the study revealed that employment in this area is dependent not only on general or specialised skills but also on complex matrix skills ranging from punctuality to working in unclean and unsafe environments, along with a set of personal qualities, such as taking initiatives and specific skills, for example polishing and colour coding.

Implications: The skills mapping technique utilised in this study is applicable globally, particularly for women indulged in casual work in developing nations’ handicrafts industry. The sustainable development goals, tourism, and handicrafts are all interconnected. The research includes understanding skills mapping, which provides insights into efficient job matching by incorporating preferences and studying the demand side of casual working by women in the handicraft sector from a skills perspective.

There is a renewed interest among economists and policymakers in striking a perfect balance between the market, state, and the community for equitable and sustained development. Inclusive development is the need of the hour and healthcare cooperatives provide the perfect means to deliver that. The cooperatives can and should have an important role to play in this scenario. However, there is an important need to provide an enabling environment for the genesis and growth of Healthcare Cooperatives in India and to learn from the best models and practices across the world. The chapter discusses the effectiveness of healthcare cooperatives.

This study aims to explore the adoption of enterprise risk management (ERM) in developing and developed countries. Is there a similarity or difference between the two contrasting institutional markets and the reasons behind them?

The adoption of ERM is analyzed on the basis of the institutional framework. The author draws empirical evidence by comparing the cases of a British and an Indian insurance company using evidence from multiple sources. This paper focuses on extra-organizational pressures exerted by economic, social and political situations across two countries that influenced the adoption decision of ERM.

The findings of this research revealed that early adopters of ERM in different institutional markets face coercive and normative pressure but not mimetic pressure. The adoption of ERM in India and the UK is dissimilar. Companies in the British insurance market encounter higher institutional forces than those in the Indian market because of higher coercive and normative pressure. The aspirations to adopt ERM in the Indian and UK markets included improved strategic decision-making to maintain stakeholder expectations and higher standards of corporate governance. In the UK, ERM was adopted to reduce surprises and fluctuations under flexible regulations but with stricter adoption and to improve credit ratings.

Previous literature has discussed ERM adoption in similar markets or within one market with similar institutional pressure. In contrast, this research is a comparative study that explains the analysis of institutional theory in two different institutional environments in the adoption of ERM.

Providing public healthcare to people is a major challenge for governments. In this sector, public-funded systems are grossly inadequate in India, and excessive commercialization and exploitation by the private sector are a stark reality. The cooperative healthcare model is emerging as an alternate system in Kerala with its strong service objective to challenge the woes of private healthcare. The cooperative hospitals in the state worked round the clock to serve the poor and needy during the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has also badly exposed the weakness of our healthcare system in the wake of challenges posed by an increase in demand for health services, especially in rural areas. The resultant rise in the cost of treatment has put severe strains on the people at a time when even their day to day jobs were in peril. India has a strong cooperative movement and world-class institutions to serve as models in each sector. The Thrikkakara Municipal Co-operative Hospital, located at Cochin in the Kerala State of India on which this case study is written was established by the Hospital Society Ltd. in 1999, as a project under the People’s Planning Programme of the Government. Today, it has grown into a medium-sized healthcare establishment with the prime objective ‘Modern healthcare to all at affordable costs’ and cater to an average of 700 outpatients a day. This case study reveals the inception, development over years, facilities available, operations, management, public interface, and outlook for the hospital to become a modern healthcare institution to serve the people still better.

The foremost objective of this chapter was to present an overview of the cooperative healthcare sector in Argentina by reviewing its brief history, components and the role these healthcare cooperatives play in the society. The second objective was to look at how these cooperatives have helped women and the local communities in which they operate.

This paper has used chiefly secondary data derived from various academic papers and official and government websites which publish cooperative sector-related information. The intention was to construct a concise yet detailed study that would be of help to other researchers in the field of healthcare cooperatives since the data related to Argentina is highly scattered and frequently found not up to date.

The research has found that health cooperatives in Argentina have aided in overcoming problems in the sector such as sectoral fragmentation, negligence and frequently inadequate standards of care management as well as operational and implementation failures that the private and government healthcare players have been accused of being fraught with. Furthermore, the cooperatives have frequently played a complementary or supplementary role rather than a competitive one with the private and government players.

Through the examples presented in this chapter, it is evident that health cooperatives in Argentina are making large impacts in the healthcare domain along with positively impacting women, marginalised and vulnerable sections of the society and the community. It only remains to be seen now how far this sector will grow in the future and how many more lives will be benefitted.