Go online to reduce mis-selling

Centralised and Aadhaar-based KYC will make purchasing financial products online faster

Sample this: Life Insurance Corporation of India’s (LIC) e-Term policy’s annual premium is Rs 23,861. The same policy, called Jeevan Amulya, bought offline will cost Rs 38,640 a year. Clearly, there is a huge benefit if policies are bought online. 

But online sales account for only a small proportion of the total policies sold by insurance companies. In case of life insurance, online sales contributed only 0.22 per cent of new business premium in 2015-16 if both individual and group businesses are included, and 0.52 per cent for individual business only (source: IRDA’s annual report, 2015-16). In health insurance, online sales contributed only two