Q1. Could you tell us how your professional journey has evolved over the years — from frontline agency leadership to building and scaling large, P&L-owned distribution ecosystems across life and health insurance?

If I look back, my journey has been very organic and ground-up. I’ve spent close to two decades in the financial services and insurance space, across life insurance, health insurance, and primary healthcare, and I’ve seen the ecosystem from almost every possible angle.

I started exactly where most people in distribution start — as a frontline sales officer. My early years were spent managing day-to-day sales activity, meeting customers, handling objections, and understanding what drives buying behaviour at the retail level. From there, I moved into branch management, where suddenly the responsibility was not just sales numbers, but people, operations, discipline, and local profitability.

Over time, I moved into larger leadership roles, and for the last eight years, I’ve been managing full P&L ownership. That shift is important. Managing P&L forces you to stop thinking in silos. You’re no longer just pushing sales — you’re responsible for:

• Cost structures
• Distribution productivity
• Claims behaviour
• Customer retention
• Technology investments
• Long-term scalability

I’ve led very large agency ecosystems — at one point managing 50,000+ agents and over 400 sales managers, running a book of business in the range of ₹600–700 crore. But what I value most is not the scale — it’s the learning that came from staying deeply connected to the ground.

One thing I will say very clearly: whatever growth I’ve achieved is because I never disconnected from frontline reality. I was fortunate to have mentors who reinforced this — that no strategy built in a boardroom survives unless it is rooted in what agents and customers are experiencing.

Even today, despite leading at an organizational level, I still think like a branch manager and a frontline leader. That grounding is what allows large distribution systems to work.

 

Q2. What fundamentally changes when distribution is treated as a standalone business model with full P&L accountability rather than as a sales function?

The most fundamental change is how you think.

When distribution is treated as a sales function, it is usually seen as a support arm. Processes are designed around it, and the role of leadership becomes incremental improvement — better incentives, slightly better processes, slightly better training. 

But when distribution is treated as a standalone business with full P&L accountability, everything shifts. 

From my experience, three things change immediately:

1. Ownership replaces execution

You are no longer executing someone else’s strategy. You are owning outcomes — revenue, cost, profitability, and sustainability.

Distribution becomes a strategic lever, not just a channel.

2. Freedom comes with responsibility

As a P&L head, you get the freedom to:

• Design the ecosystem.
• Allocate resources across operations, tech, claims, and people.
• Decide where to invest and where to pull back.

But every decision hits your bottom line. Claims inefficiency? That’s your problem. Tech bloat? Your cost. Poor retention? Your profitability.

3. Distribution becomes the core business engine

In roles where I led large distribution units — including agency-led models — distribution stopped being an assembly line and became a business in itself.

Every function — operations, claims, technology — became part of the same accountability structure. They weren’t support teams anymore; they were cost and value drivers within the same P&L.

That mindset shift, for me, was the single biggest difference.

 

Q3. How should leaders think about trust, claims experience, and service fulfilment when designing health-adjacent distribution models?

In health and insurance, trust is everything.

You are not selling a tangible product. You are selling a promise — something the customer hopes they never need but desperately relies on when life goes wrong. That makes trust the foundation of the entire distribution model.

From my experience, trust operates at multiple levels:

Trust at the grassroots distribution level

Agents and distributors do not just sell products — they sell their personal credibility. At the end of the day, it is their relationship with the customer that is on the line.

I’ve spent 20 years in B2C and B2B2C retail, and one thing is consistent:

• Distributors will only sell what they believe will not embarrass them tomorrow.

This is why credibility is non-negotiable in distribution-led models.

Claims experience is the moment of truth.

Once the sale is done, trust is evaluated during claims.

From both sides of the table — insurer and healthcare — I’ve seen this clearly:

• Claims must be seamless.
• Touchpoints must be minimal.
• Processes must be fast and transparent.

Claims is a word that is often misused. Yes, it is a two-way street — fraud exists. But if your systems are designed primarily to avoid paying claims, the model will eventually collapse.

The purpose of insurance is to settle claims, not to find reasons to deny them.

Service fulfilment is shared accountability.

Service fulfilment has two parts:

• What the organization does
• What the distributor does post-sale

Distributors must be enabled, trained, and supported — because they are the ones managing customers when things go wrong. At the same time, organizations must give them products and processes they can stand behind confidently. 

The objective can never be “sales only.” 

It must always be end-to-end customer experience.

 

Q4. How do you prevent digital efficiency gains from being offset by rising acquisition or servicing costs?

This is one of the biggest traps in today’s ecosystem.

Digital efficiency only works if the architecture is designed for change.

One of the first things I look at — especially when evaluating platforms — is:

• Is the tech open or hard-coded?

Hard-coded systems reflect emotional attachment to a founder’s or CTO’s vision. But healthcare and insurance landscapes change every year. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

From my experience, every process must be broken down and questioned:

• What can be automated?
• What must remain human-led?
• What can be outsourced?

Tech must be:

• Simple
• Intuitive
• Scalable

I have a very practical rule: 

If something takes more than three clicks, it’s not user-friendly.

Digital efficiency is defeated when:

• Tech creates friction.
• Systems are complex to explain.
• Adoption remains low.

Efficiency only offsets cost when tech:

• Improves lifetime customer value.
• Enables repeat usage.
• Reduces manual dependency.
• Becomes a revenue lever, not just an enabler.

 

Q5. What parts of today’s insurance distribution playbooks are least likely to survive the next five years?

Purely transactional distribution models will not survive.

Regulatory changes like Expense of Management (EOM) caps have already forced the industry’s hand. Earlier, companies relied on:

• High first-year commissions
• Volume-led growth
• Front-loaded incentives

That model is breaking.

What will not survive:

• “Pay more commission, sell more” thinking.
• Complex products customers do not understand.
• Underwriting done only at claims stage.

What will survive:

• Simpler products
• Better underwriting at onboarding
• Lifecycle-based incentives
• Lower acquisition cost and higher retention

One of my strongest learnings over 20 years is this:

You cannot throw people at a problem forever. 

You must throw products, platforms, and systems at it.

 

Q6. What leadership behaviours matter most when managing thousands of agents versus hundreds of employees?

Agents and employees require very different leadership approaches.

Managing agents - 

Agents are independent entrepreneurs. They are not bound to you. They choose you every day.

To lead agents, you must:

• Stay deeply connected to the ground.
• Communicate vision constantly.
• Be transparent and visible.
• Absorb frustrations and feedback.

Agents are your eyes and ears in the market. If you lose touch with them, your strategy becomes disconnected reality.

I used to do monthly town halls, not for optics, but because that’s where real feedback comes from. Otherwise, by the time information reaches leadership, it becomes a “Chinese whisper.”

Managing employees - 

Employees need:

• Structure
• Guardrails
• Clear incentives
• Space to innovate

I believe great institutions are built in great branch offices. Employees must be enabled to run their units like businesses — entrepreneurial, but within defined frameworks.

Leadership’s role is replication:

• Replicate thinking.
• Replicate values.
• Replicate decision-making.

 

Q7. If you were advising a board or an investor evaluating distribution-led insurance or healthcare platforms, what signals would you look for?

I would look well beyond presentations.

Key questions I ask:

• What is the vision — mass market or premium?
• Is the product solving a real problem?
• Is the distribution model scalable?
• Are agents partners or just commission earners?

I would look closely at:

• Incentive design.
• Agent retention (top 20%).
• Ground-level adoption.
• Repeat customer behaviour.

Most importantly, I would ask:

• Is tech an asset or just an enabler?
• Is it solving only a problem or is it generating revenue?
• Is the tech architecture open or hard-coded?
• Is the tech scalable?

Because as discussed earlier, if tech is hard-coded and emotionally built around one vision, it may not adapt to a changing landscape. And if tech is not scalable or not easy to use, then efficiency gains will not offset acquisition or servicing costs.

Whenever you are evaluating an organization, you should look at whether the tech is:

• A problem-solving tool
• An enabler
• Or a profit center

In every assembly line of the organization, you have to break down the structure and ask:

• What can be automated?
• What must remain human-led?
• What can be outsourced?

You also have to ask whether the organization is creating lifetime value for the customer or operating in a transactional manner.

Are they:

• Linking incentives to customer lifecycle?
• Focused on repeat sales?
• Focused on retention?

True scalability is visible on the ground, not just in dashboards.

If customers are happy, agents stay engaged.

If agents stay engaged, growth becomes sustainable.

One more thing which I feel is very important when boards are evaluating companies — especially distribution-led insurance or healthcare platforms — is the KPI architecture.

KPIs are not just numbers on a dashboard. They are actually the real soul of the enterprise.

When I look at an organization, I don’t just look at topline growth or market share. I look at what KPIs they are tracking and why they are tracking them.

Because KPIs tell you whether the company is genuinely moving towards its true North Star — its larger vision — or whether it is only chasing short-term outcomes.

• Are they tracking only acquisition numbers?
• Or are they equally serious about retention?
• Are they measuring claims behaviour and customer experience with the same seriousness as revenue?
• Are they tracking repeat behaviour and NPS?

As mentioned earlier in the discussion, NPS becomes critical.

If customers are happy, repeat sales happen.

If repeat sales happen, distributors remain happy.

And if distributors remain happy, the distribution engine sustains itself.

The KPIs should clearly reflect the direction in which the organization wants to go.

But dashboards alone are not enough.

There has to be a holistic ground dipstick test.

You can sit in a boardroom and look at beautiful presentations. But unless you go to the ground — speak to agents, speak to the top 20%, understand why some agents exited, speak to customers — you will never get the real pulse.

As I mentioned, strategies built in management rooms cannot be implemented unless you are connected to the ground. Whatever limited success I have achieved has been because of staying deeply rooted to the distribution workforce and understanding what they want.

There should be a 360-degree view.

Most investors meet CXOs. But deeper evaluation should also include feedback from ground-level distributors.

Only if the product is simple, easy to understand, and solving a real problem for the customer will the organization succeed — because the agents will be happy. Otherwise, they will never be happy.

And fundamentally, one very important philosophical question that boards must ask is this:

Is the organization optimizing stakeholder gain for all primary stakeholders — customers, distributors, employees, partners — or is it only maximizing shareholder value?

Because in distribution-led businesses, if you only optimize for shareholders, the imbalance will show up — in claims experience, distributor churn, or customer dissatisfaction.

In my experience, sustainable models are those where value is created across the ecosystem.

If stakeholders win, shareholders eventually win.