Soon after instructing insurance companies to link Aadhaar number of their agents with agency code, IRDAI is now planning to instruct insurers to upload details of their agents on the Insurance Information Bureau (IIB) intermediary database portal called ‘ENVOY’.
In fact, the insurance regulator has already asked insurance companies to upload details of insurance intermediaries such as brokers, corporate agents and web –aggregators.
Last month, IRDAI had asked insurance companies to link the Aadhaar number of their insurance salespersons like agents, brokers, insurance marketing firms (IMFs) with their respective agency codes.
Initially, IIB had developed this platform to keep a record of all point-of-sale persons (PoSPs). However, it has now extended it to brokers, corporate agents and web aggregators in its second phase.
Later, it will cover the remaining categories of insurance intermediaries like agents and insurance marketing firms.
Sharing the rationale for this move, IRDAI said, “ln an endeavour to ensure that all licensed insurance sales persons working for insurers and intermediaries including entities such as insurance agents, broker qualified persons, specified persons of corporate agents, authorised verifiers of web aggregators and point of sales persons (POS) do not work with multiple insurers/ insurance intermediaries in the same business category, IRDAI has initiated the central database, ENVOY of all insurance sales persons in India to be constituted at Insurance Information Bureau of India (llBl).”
ENVOY also provides a search facility for the use of insurers where they can check details before recruiting them.
The web link for ENVOY is https://envoy.iib.gov.in. Insurance companies will have to ensure that their intermediaries upload their data by September 30, 2017.