В Индии запускают цифровую инфраструктуру PIR для создания единого реестра страховых полисов

The public insurance registry (PIR) is being conceptualised as a digital public infrastructure for insurance, designed to create an ecosystem in which data, with the customer’s consent, can flow seamlessly among stakeholders. The larger aim is to shift India from the old adage that “insurance is sold” towards a market where “insurance is also bought”. The proposal could bring several changes for policyholders, from putting all their insurance policies in one place and making health insurance portability easier to enabling product comparisons, simpler servicing and better visibility into agents and intermediaries. Here are key takeaways: All your insurance policies in one place PIR proposes a consent-based, unified view of a policyholder’s insurance portfolio across insurers. This could help nominees and family members discover unknown policies and unclaimed insurance money. Once a death claim is processed by one insurer and reported to PIR with the claimant’s consent, the registry could identify other policies and prompt the relevant insurers to initiate the claim process. If family members do not know the policy number, other details could help facilitate a search for unclaimed amounts. “It is a useful feature, certainly, but legacy data could turn out to be the biggest practical challenge. India has millions of old policies with different formats, incomplete records and inconsistent identifiers,” said Mayank Gosar, CEO, Softcon Capital. “Converting this historical data into common standards and linking the same customer correctly across insurers could be a huge exercise.” No repetitive KYC, easier updates A policyholder with several policies could potentially submit a single request to update details such as nominee, phone number, email, address or bank account, with the request communicated across insurers with consent. The proposal also envisages consent-based reuse of verified information, so a customer who has already completed KYC with one insurer need not repeatedly submit the same information when buying another policy. “One-click update sounds simple, but consent is complicated. If a customer changes their nominee or bank account across five insurers, PIR needs to know exactly which insurers/policies are covered by the request. Consent has to be specific, auditable and revocable. A mistake here could have serious consequences,” said Gosar. ‘Know Your Agent’ facility The proposal goes beyond insurers. Policyholders could potentially access an agent’s or intermediary’s track record, including sales quality, persistency, customer satisfaction, complaints and instances of mis-selling. Intermediaries could also use this information to assess the conduct and performance of sales personnel before hiring them and while deciding whether to retain them. This, along with the regulator’s earlier proposal to link a policy to the last salesperson who sold it, could strengthen accountability and help curb mis-selling. “The regulator's intent to change the commission structure, along with PIR and several other measures, could together tackle the mis-selling problem. If you remove incentives from the system, the scope for making money through mis-selling also reduces," said Saurabh Vijayvergia, founder & CEO, CoverSure. “Challenges, however, will remain, particularly around implementation. There could be ways to circumvent the system. For instance, what happens if an incorrect intermediary number is entered when a policy is sold?" Vijayvergia said. Comparing insurance policies could become more transparent PIR proposes a neutral comparison mechanism where products can be compared using common parameters such as coverage, exclusions, waiting periods, premiums and benefits. The information could also be presented in the policyholder’s preferred language. “Insurance has a language problem. Simply putting more information in front of people will not help. The data is already available in abundance if someone wants to compare policies. What we need is to educate consumers on what exactly they should be comparing. Moreover, in the absence of standardisation, how do we know whether it is really an apple-to-apple comparison?” said Vijayvergia. Grievance filing could become a single, integrated process PIR proposes 24x7 digital grievance access through mobile, apps or websites, in the policyholder’s preferred language and through voice or data. It also envisages integration between insurers, Bima Bharosa and other grievance platforms, allowing consumers to track a complaint and escalate it without repeatedly explaining the same issue. However, it remains to be seen whether this is implemented in its truest sense, given that grievance-handling mechanisms exist today as well, but can fail or take a long time to deliver results, particularly when insurers are not held accountable for missing regulatory timelines. Porting health insurance could become much easier When moving a health policy to another insurer, the registry could transfer relevant policy information and claims history with the policyholder’s consent. The stated objective is to preserve continuity benefits such as waiting periods served, no-claim bonus and pre-existing disease tenure, while reducing repeated documentation and manual verification. “Portability will depend on data quality. Seamless health portability will work only if insurers maintain accurate, standardised information on waiting periods, NCB, PED tenure and claims. Digitisation alone cannot fix incomplete or incorrect data. If PIR pulls wrong information from one insurer and another relies on it, who bears responsibility? The source insurer, PIR or the insurer taking the decision?” Gosar said. The PIR could shift insurance from an insurer-by-insurer journey to a single digital insurance record where consumers can compare products, manage policies, port coverage, track grievances and find forgotten policies. But how the data is ultimately used, particularly for underwriting, and what safeguards consumers get if the information is inaccurate, will depend on the final regulations and operating framework. “If PIR gets implemented in the right spirit, we could well be listed among the top three insurance markets in India after China and the US. For this, insurers and intermediaries have to become compliant in spirit and not take short-cuts,” Vijayvergia said.