Two months after the introduction of the insurance repository system, only ten insurance companies are ready for integration.
Sufficient infra
Out of the total 52 insurance firms in the country, only 20 per cent firms are ready with the sufficient infrastructure.
The firms include Reliance Life Insurance, ICICI Prudential Life and HDFC Life Insurance, according to Viiveck Verma, Executive Director, Karvy Insurance Repository Ltd.
After attending the Life Insurance Council meet in Mumbai, which deliberated on e-insurance on Tuesday, Mr. Verma said, “A majority of the companies are not ready. They are expected to convert their physical data into electronic form and should be able to digitally communicate with the repository data of the system. The conversion is significantly low at 20,000 accounts so far and about 3,000 policies have been converted.”
Going by the intentions of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, the repository system is likely to be made mandatory in approximately a year’s time, according to Mr. Verma.
“The conversion will take place gradually. It starts with about four crore policies that industry issues each year and eventually, the entire 35 crore existing policies will be digitised and integrated with repositories. IRDA is still discussing with the insurance firms and will soon fix time for mandatory conversion,” he added.
Electronic form
Insurance repository system lets policy holders keep insurance policies in electronic form and to undertake changes and revisions in the policy with speed and accuracy. Karvy was one among the five firms licensed by the IRDA to be the insurance repositories. The rest four are: NSDL Database management Ltd., Central Insurance Repository Ltd., SHCIL Projects Ltd., and CAMS Repository Services Ltd.
The repositories are expected to bring down the management cost of each policy from the present Rs.120 per policy to Rs.25 per annum.
