Short-changed by your agent who now vanished? Find him soon on central database

If your insurance agent has recently short-changed you and vanished from the system, don’t fret. Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) is launching a new central database that will have details of all insurance intermediaries including agents.

The regulatory body has said this is to ensure that all licensed insurance sales persons working for insurers and intermediaries including entities such as insurance agents, broker qualified persons, specified persons of corporate agents, authorised verifiers of web aggregators, point of sales persons (POS) do not work with multiple insurers in the same business category.

A senior official said intermediaries have been found to be doing business for multiple companies without proper permissions. “Agents lure customers to buy a product that gives them the best commissions and vanish after the sale. Once the database is functional, they can be easily tracked,” he added.

Almost 20-30 percent of the first year premium is paid to an insurance agent as commission. So, higher the ticket size, higher is his commission amount.

All the information related to the intermediaries and their personal details are put up on the Central Database of all Insurance Sales Persons in India (ENVOY), to be constituted at Insurance Information Bureau of India (IIBI).

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ENVOY also provides a search facility for the use of insurers and insurance intermediaries whereby an applicant insurance sales person's details are queried for a match in the database.

“Only if an individual’s name does not figure in the database for any other insurance company will he be considered for the role,” the official added.

To avoid conflict of interest, IRDAI norms prevent insurance agents from working with multiple companies. However, some of them continue to do so which is a clear violation of the rules.

In the first stage, ENVOY covers Point of Sale Persons (POS), specified persons of corporate agents, qualified persons of insurance brokers and authorised verifiers of web aggregators. The next phase, to be taken up shortly, would cover all remaining categories such as individual agents and insurance marketing firms.