Do you know that the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDA) has mandated that insurance policies of a certain ticket size have to be issued in the electronic form (NOTIFICATION F.NO.IRDAI/REG/16/128/2016)? Yes! And this has been made mandatory since October last year.
The e-insurance policies will be stored in an e-insurance account. This is an electronic account that will help store an individual’s insurance policies digitally irrespective of which insurance provider issued the policy. Storing your insurance policy in electronic form makes a lot of sense because your physical policy could get lost or you might hunt frantically for it during claims and not find it.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could convert your existing policies too into the electronic form? Now, you can. There is a process that you need to follow to convert your insurance policies in the physical form to the electronic form. Here’s all that you need to know.
- You need to open an e-insurance account. You can do this with the help of an insurance provider or a repository such as National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) Database Management, Central Insurance Repository, Computer Age Management Services (CAMS) Repository Services, and Karvy Insurance Repository. You need to submit an account opening form along with Know Your Customer (KYC) documents.
- Now, to convert your existing policies to the electronic form, you need to get the Policy Conversion Form from the website of a repository.
- You need to fill separate forms for each of the insurance providers who issued the policies to you.
- You can submit the form in any one of the following ways to get your policies converted:
- Submit the form to an approved person as listed on the repository’s website. This would be financial institutions such as banks or stock brokerages.
- Submit it to the nearest branch of the insurance provider. Note that you need to submit separate forms for each of the insurance providers. For example, if you have two policies from insurer A and 1 from B, you need two conversion forms. One for A and one for B.
- Courier it to the repository’s address.
- Scan and email it to an email address provided by the repository and then courier the hard copy to repository’s address.
- You don’t need to submit your physical policy document along with the policy conversion form. This is because the conversion form will require you to enter your policy details along with your e-insurance account details.
- Once the insurance provider receives your request for conversion of your policies, they will link the policy to your e-insurance account.
- You will receive alerts through SMS as well as email once the policy has been added to your e-insurance account.
- Note that you have the option of submitting the conversion form along with the application for your e-insurance account. However, you can link the policy to the e-insurance account only after you get the e-insurance account number.
You have the option of delinking any policy from your e-insurance account at any point of time. However, it is best to retain your policies in the e-insurance account because you only need the account number along with relevant documents to make claims and not the physical copy of the policy. Note that you can convert any insurance policy that you have into an e-insurance policy. There are no costs attached to this exercise! So, go ahead and convert your Life insurance, Health insurance or any other policy to enjoy the digital policy benefits.
Sponsored by ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Co. Ltd
The views expressed here are solely those of the blogger in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the legal enforcement authority or any other entity. The user of this information is advised to consult experts in the domain for concluding any opinion or course of action.