BEFORE the cash register stops ringing, you may want to add home insurance to go with that carton of milk or can of spaghetti sauce.

Yes, it has come to this scale: Monarch Insurance Co. has brought nonlife insurance products into the grocery shelf as the company joins retail trade.

“If…customers [are unable to come] to us, why not bring [our product] to them?” senior vice president T.L. Arunachalam said as he explained the move to partner with retailer stores in selling non-life insurance.

“There’s a clear market out there that’s missing out in abating risks because we’re not doing enough to reach out to them; this is one way of doing so,” Arunachalam told the BusinessMirror days before Monarch launches one of its several products this year.

Arunachalam said marketing insurance at the retail-trade level is a novel way of widening the base of Filipinos insured, which is below 2 percent of the population.

It’s an alternative means of distributing an old product, executive vice president Y.C. Lai added, citing that agents, for example, would sell it after a customer pays for his or her groceries at the cashier.

Lai said the ultimate goal is to bring down the cost associated with buying something clients hope they wouldn’t use, like accident or motor-vehicle insurance.

“This is a method that has been tested in India and, like there, could also be successful here.”

Monarch is 40-percent owned by Chennai, India-headquartered Shriram Group of Cos.

She said they are also looking at establishing one-stop insurance shops patterned after gasoline stations with convenience stores. They are also thinking of putting up kiosk-type stores in supermarkets and hypermarts where agents can sell nonlife insurance products.

Arunachalam said they have talked to several retail organizations, five of which would begin selling products by the third quarter of the year.

Negotiations are still ongoing, thus Lai and Arunachalam declined to name the retail stores.

Lai emphasized that while they want these companies to feel responsible for the product or services, “Monarch remains the risk carrier in this business.”

Arunachalam said the system as well as pricing would be “customized for each organization.”

Lai added that unlike other insurance companies that use banks as conduits for marketing products, or stand-alone stores in shopping malls, Monarch’s method would be within the retail environment.

This strategy, according to Arunachalam, is in line with the company’s business plan in the next five years: expanding its presence, extending product line and developing more channels.

In a brief, Monarch targets to achieve growth of about 40 percent this year to P145 million.

REVENUE inflows in April reached a sufficient amount that Manila was able post a budget surplus of P25.8 billion.

THE peso yesterday closed unchanged in thin trading because of holidays in some Asian countries and persistent worries on inflation and crude prices, currency dealers said.

BANCO de Oro Unibank Inc. (BDO) sold P10 billion worth of unsecured subordinated debt eligible as Lower Tier 2 Capital, twice the amount of the original issuance announced last week.

BEFORE the cash register stops ringing, you may want to add home insurance to go with that carton of milk or can of spaghetti sauce.

THE Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) would not be pushed into collecting the excise tax on thousands of small-scale gold miners around the country as this would immediately dry up a lucrative source of the precious metal that has helped strengthen the country’s external sector in recent years.