Kolkata, Jun 13 (IANS): SBI Life Insurance is eyeing to achieve a growth of 30-40 per cent in the new business premium in 2016-17, a top company official said.

"We are targeting to achieve 30-40 per cent growth in new business premium in the current fiscal and intending to grow by 25-26 per cent in the gross total premium including new and old," said company's Managing Director and CEO Arijit Basu.

The life insurer will remain focused on banking and agency channel to achieve the growth, he said.

The company achieved 29 per cent growth in total new business premium in 2015-16 and 37 per cent growth in the rated Individual new business premium as compared to 8 per cent for the industry, he said.

"This was attributed to performance of banking and agency channel. Sales through agency channel grew by 12-13 per cent in the last year while banking channel also had a fantastic growth," Basu said.

"We intend to grow by 20 per cent in the current fiscal in agency channel while our banking channel growth is expected to over 50 per cent," he said.

The life insurer will strengthen its banking channel by increasing the number of licensed specified persons who are SBI staffs having licence to sell life insurer's product.

"We have about 28,000-30,000 specified persons adding 3,000 in the last year. We will increase the number," he said.

Banking channel contributes about 55 per cent of products sales while agency has a share of about 39 per cent, the remaining comes from other channels.

The company plans to launch a new ULIP product for high net worth individual by end of this month, he said.

The company reported the gross total premium received in FY 2015-16 was Rs 15,825 crore, of which the new business premium accounted for Rs 7,107 crore and renewal premium accounted for Rs 8,719 crore.

Corresponding figures for last financial year were Rs 12,867 crore, Rs 5,529 crore and Rs 7,338 crore respectively.

The company has about 27 products in individual platform while group platform has about 20 more.