Sowmini G Prasad

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Insurance Products) Regulations, 2023, hereafter "Draft Regulations", was released by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) in December 2023.

Insurance companies should align their sales practices to generate the best outcomes for low income households by ensuring easy access to a variety of products with disclosures that provide accurate information.

When viewed from a consumer’s perspective, these challenges manifest at different stages of their journey with a health insurance program, beginning from the decision to enrol in a program and ending at the renewal stage. While tweaks to the design of the health insurance program or moving to a more integrated model of healthcare provision may help in this blog post, we explore the role that social capital can play in circumventing some of these challenges.

This blog post summarises key takeaways from a virtual workshop we recently hosted. It was conducted against the backdrop of a study that we recently concluded titled “Can information disclosures influence life insurance purchase decisions for low-income households?”.

Unlike term plans that provide life risk cover or unit-linked schemes, where returns are market-linked, endowment plans offer maturity benefits upon survival & minimum guaranteed return.

Low-income households work with irregular income inflows, resulting in shrinking financial planning horizon and necessitating frequent decisions in response to frequent changes.

Life insurance is an important financial tool that allows households to manage financial risks arising from the death of an earning member.

There are several reasons for low take-up of life insurance policies in general and specifically low take-up of term life insurance. These factors range from supply side barriers such as misaligned incentive structures for agents selling life insurance policies, lack of availability and accessibility to a larger suite of life insurance products customized to the needs of low-income households to demand-side barriers such as household’s contextual factors that limit their awareness and priority for a life insurance product and their behavioural preferences pertaining to life insurance products.

In this note, we discuss how the current approach of the PCA framework is inconsistent with the objectives it seeks to achieve.

By requiring only limited public reporting on asset quality, banks in India have enjoyed a level of opacity that banks in other jurisdictions do not