August 21, 2014
Health and motor insurance are likely to be introduced on India’s insurance repository system (IRS) by December. The move is expected to speed up the conversion of policies into electronic form.
“We are planning to roll out health and motor insurance on IRS by the end of this calender year. We expect these two general insurance segments to be the main volume driver for the insurance repositories,” Karvy Insurance Repository executive director, Mr Viiveck Verma, told Press Trust of India.
At present, only life insurance policies are stored by insurance repositories.
Mr Verma said that he expects the pace of converting insurance policies into electronic form to increase after the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) makes e-insurance mandatory. “We expect the decision in another one year,” he said.
IRDA launched a pilot programme for two months from 1 July, in which it is mandatory for all life insurers to participate. In the pilot programme, each life insurer is to convert to electronic form a minimum of 1,000 or 5% of the existing individual policies (issued in hard form and currently in force), whichever is less, for each of the insurance repositories.
After the pilot scheme is over, the five insurance repositories, IRDA and the Life and General Insurance Councils, will together create a mechanism to promote insurance repositories in the country,” Mr Verma said.
Apart from Karvy, the other insurance repository companies are NSDL Database Management, Central Insurance Repository, SHCIL Projects, and CAMS Repository Services.