Mumbai, July 18 -- HDFC Life Insurance is prioritizing a steady growth in its value of new business (VNB) even if it has to settle for a lower margin in the bargain, Niraj Shah, the company's executive director and chief financial officer, said.

VNB is an important metric for an insurance company, and represents the sum of present value of all future profits from new policies sold during a specific quarter or year. It indicates the long-term profitability of the new policies sold.

"The objective will be to try and maintain margins at levels similar to last year. However, if we see higher growth compared with what we are anticipating right now, we are happy to kind of do some trade-off with growth and profit margins, provided we get to s...