Online Insurance: Cleaning the web

With a spate of insurance companies launching online products to reduce cost and insurance web aggregators offering information to customers, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, has come come out with new draft guidelines to regulate the aggregators.

The insurance regulator has proposed that the Insurance Web Aggregators or IWAs be registered under the Companies Act and must have a minimum net worth of R50 lakh at any time during the previous three consecutive years. It has also proposed that they should not have any referral arrangement with an insurer and most importantly, that they will not be an insurance agent, corporate agent, micro-insurance agent or an insurance broker. Further, they should only display information pertaining to insurance products and price comparisons of different insurers approved by Irda. The draft guidelines also underline that IWAs will have to ensure that if a customer evinces interest in buying an insurance product but does nor prefer any insurer, the IWA will not transmit the customer’s details to the insurer.

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