In an exclusive interaction with Adlin Pertishya Jeberaj, Correspondent of Finance Outlook India, Eima Azim, Co-Founder, Women in Insurance India (WIIN) points out how women-led leadership and distribution is no longer a boundary to the growth of insurance but a core to capital deployment, quality of risks and long-term profitability. She emphasizes that investing in women consolidates underwriting discipline; increases reach in trusted markets and creates resilient portfolios in line with the changing risk reality.

Eima Azim is an insurance industry professional where she leads the equity, innovation, and leadership development in the industry. Having extensive experience in mentorship, strategy development programs, and talent acceleration, she supports the idea of organized ways of career development of women professionals in the insurance field to influence distribution, underwriting, and governance.

How do you see the current market indicators that show insurance companies are increasing capital allocation and strategic funding toward women-led insurance verticals or distribution channels?

Currently, there are particular signals that insurers and public institutions are backing women-led distribution with intent, not as an afterthought. LIC’s Bima Sakhi Yojana, for example, is explicitly designed to train and support rural women as professional insurance agents with stipends and structured handholding, building a dedicated women-led grassroots channel rather than using women as an auxiliary sales force. In parallel, private players have rolled out programmes like Aditya Birla Health Insurance’s ‘Springboard’ and ‘She Leads’ to move women into frontline and sales leadership roles, which means capital, training, and career pathways are now being architected around women as growth drivers.

From the work at Women in Insurance (WIIIN), these shifts validate has been consistently observed when a women trusted as builders of distribution, they expand reach, deepen trust, and open new customer segments. The leadership and capability-building work is aimed at equipping early- to mid-career women with the business, strategic, and future-of-work skills they need to take on these emerging opportunities.

How do women leaders influence improvements in underwriting quality, risk selection, and the financial health of the insurance portfolio?

Working with women across the value chain, I see that women leaders tend to combine analytical rigour with a strong bias for stakeholder impact, which is exactly what good underwriting demand. Their approach to risk selection typically weighs long-term relationship value, policyholder behaviour, and reputational considerations alongside pure technical pricing, leading to portfolios that are more resilient and better aligned with the organization’s risk appetite.

Through WIIN Accelerator's focus on business fundamentals, risk resilience, and governance, the aim is to prepare women not just for execution roles but for meaningful participation in shaping underwriting guidelines, product design, and capital allocation conversations that ultimately influence portfolio quality.

Also Read: Bridging the Insurance Trust Gap in Tier 2 and Hilly India

What financial models are most effective for measuring ROI from leadership development investments targeted at women professionals in insurance?

ROI on leadership development in insurance cannot be reduced to a simple training cost versus test-score equation; it has to reflect balance sheets, solvency, and succession. For women professionals in particular, the most meaningful models blend talent, productivity, and risk perspectives rather than sitting only in HR dashboards.

There is three-stage impact logic: immediate learning shifts, intermediate application through live business cases and simulations, and long-term movement in retention, role expansion, and promotion readiness. For sponsoring organizations, the real ROI shows up when programme data is connected to levers like lower attrition in hard-to-replace roles, faster time-to-promotion for women in early- and mid-career bands, and contributions to distribution growth, innovation, and operational improvements. Seen this way, investing in women’s leadership strengthens organizational resilience, supports succession, and builds a more capable leadership pipeline for a rapidly evolving sector.

What financial KPIs should boards monitor to track the impact of women in key leadership positions within insurance organizations?

Boards that are serious about performance and stewardship need to move beyond counting how many women are “at the table” and start asking what those leaders are doing to move the numbers that matter.

In insurance, that means linking women’s leadership directly to profitability, risk quality, and franchise value across the full career arc, from emerging managers to CXOs and directors, not just one experienced band.​

In my view, four clusters of KPIs deserve board-level attention:

• Capital and earnings quality KPIs
  Diversity adjusted retention in P&L, distribution, underwriting, actuarial, and risk roles, disaggregated by gender and career stage, as well as stability and depth in succession for these roles. This indicates whether women are present where capital is actually deployed and earnings are generated.
• Growth and productivity KPIs
  Revenue, productivity, and new business metrics for women led business units, initiatives, and distribution channels, particularly in emerging segments and regions where trust and inclusion are key to market expansion.
• Risk and portfolio health KPIs
  Client retention, quality of book, and other risk outcomes (for example, persistency or loss experience at a portfolio level) in areas influenced by diverse leadership teams, to understand how inclusion is shaping long-term portfolio resilience rather than just top-line growth.
• Equity and pipeline KPIs
  Promotion velocity, internal mobility, and pay equity indicators for women at every leadership tier, from first-line managers to the executive committee and board. This shows whether the organization is compounding or leaking its investment in women over time.

Adding an instance to a consideration, at WIIN’s model structure provides an industry focused learning baseline and endline views; six-month post-program mentorship; and a sustained alumni network- gives partners a way to follow cohorts across these dimensions, not just immediately after a program but as they grow into architects of strategy, governance, and innovation.

Also Read: How Conversational AI is Redefining Finance Efficiency

Over the next decade, how will women in leadership redefine profitability levers, risk models, and capital efficiency in the insurance sector?

Women in leadership are already starting to reframe what “good business” looks like in insurance, and over the next decade that shift will only deepen.

Growth outcomes will increasingly be seen not just as a margin on today’s book, but as the compounded outcome of trust, inclusion, technology, and governance choices made over many years. The women we work with are being equipped to sit at exactly this intersection, combining financial acumen with systems thinking, AI fluency, and design-led innovation in ways that change how risk is priced, how customers are segmented, and how capital is stewarded across cycles.

As more women influence strategy, underwriting, investments, and distribution, three levers will look very different.

Profitability levers will shift from chasing short-term volume and price wins to building high-quality earnings through lifetime value, persistence of relationships, and reputational resilience, especially as insurers move toward more advisory, prevention-oriented, and service-rich business models.

Second, risk models will increasingly account for behavioural, social, and ESG dimensions, not as “nice to have” add-ons but as core inputs to how portfolios are constructed and monitored.

Third, capital efficiency will increasingly come from disciplined deployment into segments long overlooked including, but not limited to women, informal workers, and small enterprises where thoughtful product design and trusted distribution can unlock deep, durable, and profitable risk pools.

An example, WIIN’s long-term bet is that when women are present as architects of these choices, the balance sheet becomes stronger precisely because the ecosystem becomes fairer, more innovative, and more future-ready.