Irdai to introduce norms for more qualified insurance sales personnel

Tripathy said that despite the rapid growth in the insurance industry in recent years, there is a gap in education and upskilling of the industry's employees

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) will introduce regulations to ensure that more qualified people are employed at the entry level to sell insurance policies, Satyajit Tripathy, Member - Distribution, said on Thursday.

 

Speaking at ASSOCHAM’s 16th Global Insurance Summit and Awards, Tripathy said, “…we need to scale up quickly on the education and training side, and I can assure you that very soon the regulator will come out with regulations to ensure that we have more qualified people even at entry level while they are selling policies. It is not that anyone who has just passed 8th standard or 10th standard can go ahead and sell a policy. This industry has upgraded, and it needs education to a much bigger scale and greater efficacy.”

 

He said that despite the rapid growth in the insurance industry in recent years, there is a gap in education and upskilling of the industry’s employees. The industry lacks both the number of institutions and the quality of education being imparted.

 

“If we remain an industry that feels we can continue to sell the mundane policies of health, a few motor policies, and some of the other miscellaneous products, then we will increasingly fail in our duty to address complex risks, develop underwriting capacity to write those risks, and prevent those underwriting challenges from being outsourced abroad at high cost instead of being written in India,” he said.

 

Tripathy added, “If we don’t have such skills and fail to develop them quickly, we will again fail in our duty to attract business from overseas into the country. While the best of our risks will go overseas with higher pricing, we will be left with companies that focus purely on marketing and selling the same simple health, water, and miscellaneous policies.”